


Burning in Hell

by Dragoncurl



Series: The Angel is Coming [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, maybe some other stuff i cant think of now, theres some bad stuff too and while they dont show up on every chapter i guess i oughtta tag them so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 70,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6804697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragoncurl/pseuds/Dragoncurl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The main idea behind this is 'what if Sans were successful in his attempt to stop a Genocide run?' It started as a spur-of-the-moment thing that I basically made up as I wrote it. It was my first time writing any sort of serious fic too. Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snow and Dust

It starts as nothing more than a whisper running on the mouths of the children.

A human is in the forest! Such an occurrence hasn't happened in so long that the only monsters still alive to remember it are probably the king himself and some old turtle guy in Waterfall. The queen would probably count too if she hadn't just up and vanished one day. It's so strange that Loppe actually decides to visit Grillby's to see if anyone's heard anything more specific.

The bunny monster steps outside her shop and enters her sister's inn instead. "Hey sis, can you keep an eye on the shop for a bit? Been hearing some strange things, I'm gonna see if I can get somethin' outta the fire guy."

The other bunny nods. "Sure thing, sis! You wait here, Snowball," she says to her son sitting next to her, to which he merely mutters a little 'okay' and continues to scribble on the paper he has behind the counter. Collie herself fetches a heavy azure cloak with little star-like dots from under the same counter and drapes it around her shoulders, then follows her sister outside and goes to stand between her own establishment and Loppe's shop.

"Thanks, sis," Loppe says. With that done, the vendor begins to pace along the rest of the Snowdin buildings.

"Hey Cinnamon!" She kneels to ruffle the fur between the ears of the tiny little bunny. He can't speak yet so he just squeaks in protest, making both of his sisters giggle almost in unison. "How's things, Bonnie?"

The cheerful rabbit monster with the leash bounces in place. "I'm just great! You know how I love walking little Cinnamon around, he needs to get used to the snow! But where are you going?" She tilts her head to the side, one ear dipping almost horizontal.

"Grillby's," Loppe responds. "Want to check on a few rumors running around."

Bonnie giggles again. "Are you sure you don't mean kids? I saw a bunch of them run past here just now getting ready for a snowball war!"

Loppe smiles fondly, but just shakes her head. "No, it's the fire man I want to talk to. Later, sis." She waves goodbye, and also gives a brief wave to Bonnie's cousin standing by the entrance to their home. Scotch is still a bit shy, having only just arrived back from the capital after a long stay for studying, so he just waves back quietly.

"See you!" the bunny holding the leash says, waving enthusiastically.

Loppe follows along the snowy road at a sedated pace, exchanges idle greetings with some of the locals. She says hello to the blue-furred bear arranging the gifts under the tree and points out an error on the name written on one of the tags. She asks how the brown-furred bear is doing and waves at the stout little mouse monster and the horned creature across the door to Grillby's place, both of them wrapped in their usual garments of an oversized scarf and a bright orange cloak.

The bar is almost empty when she steps inside. The dog guard is still out on patrol, so only a few of the more stable patrons are hanging around. Thankfully that doesn't include Grillby's annoying, self-proclaimed 'translator'. The guy can talk just fine. But she sees the horse monster with the green mohawk, the fish guy, the skeleton with the blue coat, the toothy fellow, and...

...sigh.

Loppe's mother is here. As always. Since their father fell down and they stopped getting news about him from the Royal Scientist, their mother hasn't been coping well. She's almost always holed up in the bar now, completely drunk and completely uncaring of Loppe and her siblings. She didn't even name their youngest brother since their father fell down on the very next day after his birth, Collie had to do that. Loppe's had to take over for their mother, being the eldest sister and all, and while she's old enough to handle it it's still not ideal.

Her mother's eyes are glazed over and staring vaguely at the ceiling. She has one hand resting loosely around a bottle. She doesn't even notice Loppe. The shopkeeper decides not to disturb her now and looks around again.

Wait, wasn't the skeleton just here? His seat's empty now. Hmm, he's always been an odd one.

Nevermind. More important things to worry about.

"Hiya Grillbs," she calls as she steps up to the counter, waving in greeting to the other patrons. The fire monster merely nods. "You hear anythin' about a human in the forest?" Grillby nods again while Loppe takes one of the empty seats. "What's their deal? Anythin' we should worry about?"

There's a long silence, during which only the quiet crackling of Grillby's fire and the constant jukebox music is heard. Then...

"...maybe."

Loppe's tranquil smile peters off. "What?" She lowers her voice and leans in close, not caring about the strange looks from the other monsters present. "Grillby, what do you know?"

Another not-quite-silence.

"...dust... when they left the ruins..."

Loppe goes pale underneath her cream fur. The fact that monsters are technically at war against humans crashes back into place in her mind with horrible abruptness. There hasn't been a human in the underground in so long that everyone's just grown complacent.

"Grillby, are you sure? What about the Royal Guard?"

By now everyone in the bar is listening in to her urgent whispers. The horse monster even manages to, if not turn off the jukebox, at the very least lower its volume to make it near-silent.

The fire monster's response comes with a delay as usual, and even lower than normal. His flames seem to burn just a tiny bit dimmer.

"...Doggo is dead..."

A collective gasp rings out through the bar.

Then everyone jumps when the front door literally bangs open and a chill gust of wind blows Grillby's flames around.

It's an icedrake, panicked and out of breath (a good portion of their young call themselves chilldrakes instead for some reason).

"There's a human in the forest killing monsters! I saw them, I just barely managed to hide, we need to **run**!"

Total pandemonium breaks out. Every monster present rushes to the exit. The horse monster just starts to follow the already fleeing icedrakes, not having relatives in town. The others turn away to find their homes, warn their families and pack their things. Even Grillby calmly puts down the glass and cleaning rag and leaves through his fire exit.

Loppe's mother is still in a daze when her daughter grabs her arm and makes her jerk upright. "Mom! Mom, get up, we have to go!" Loppe pulls hard on her mother's arm, even manages to drag her to her feet, but she's hardly cognizant of what's going on.

"Wha...? Where're we goin'? Are we gonna s- *hic* see some hot guys~?"

She's practically draped over Loppe, the shopkeeper has to fight to keep her mother upright. "Yeah, sure, hot guys, just _move!_ " Loppe has to shout to get the other bunny monster to actually start using her legs.

Slowly, unsteadily, they make their way to the door and out into the street. Voices fill the air, children asking questions, monsters still looking for family members, warnings shouted to no one in particular. By the look of it, the Ice Village in the forest has been completely emptied, and Snowdin Town seems to the following suit fast. The burly wolf that mans the ice machine has the slime family perched on his shoulders as he strides past.

"Sis!"

It's Bonnie, running down the street with Cinnamon in her arms. "Sis, what's going on?! All these drakes coming through, they're saying there's danger and something about a human?"

"Seems like it, Bon, the human's bad news. They killed Doggo," Loppe says, not letting her sister interject when her hand flies to her mouth. "Wait here with mom, okay? I'll get Collie and Scotch and we're leaving."

Bonnie's eyes go shiny with tears and her mouth trembles. "But where are we going?! If even the Royal Guard can't handle them?! What are we doing?!"

Loppe opens her mouth to answer, realizes she has no idea, and closes it again. She props their mother up against the wall of the bar to give herself time to think, but Bonnie's tears start to roll and she just can't bear to see her little sister cry, that's not how it's supposed to be!

"Bon, no, please. We'll be fine, okay? We can figure that out later, right now we need to get away from here. Just stay here with mom, alright? And keep an eye on little Cinnamon. Can you do that for me?"

Loppe's hands have gone to her sister's shoulders. Bonnie sniffles and rubs a hand over the fur, already frozen into little spikes on her cheeks from her tears. "Yeah, okay. Just hurry back, Lop."

The shopkeeper smiles and giver her sister a tight hug. "I will, Bon."

And then she's off. She sticks to the edge of the trees to avoid all the monsters going in the opposite direction and in no time at all reaches the inn and her own shop. Collie's still here, looking worried beyond compare. She opens her mouth to ask, but Loppe starts first.

"Collie, go get Snowball, we're leaving. Get Scotch to help you grab some stuff from home and lock it up." She indicates the two little buildings behind her sister.

Collie hesitates for a moment. "...that bad?" she asks simply.

"That bad," Loppe confirms with a nod.

Her sister doesn't need another word to spring into action. Each of them dives back into their own places of business. On her side, Loppe grabs a large, roughspun sack and shoves a few stacks of cinnamon buns inside, each stored in its own separate container of wickerware. She doesn't care about the human stuff, and the bisicles will just melt outside of Snowdin, so she leaves them. The gold would be nice, but it'd take too much time to dump it all into a single container and would be just too heavy to lug around. She leaves that too. What matters is keeping her family safe, she won't need that much money.

Loppe is about to leave when a last-minute idea comes to her. She pulls a scrap of paper from behind the counter along with an old, half-broken pen, and writes out a hasty note that she leaves tucked under the corner of the till.

Maybe the human will feel bad about their actions and change their mind. It's a long shot, but it doesn't hurt to try.

With everything done, she heads back out and even forgets to lock the door in her haste. The door to the inn is partially open as well, letting her see a large stuffed rabbit posing as Snowball behind the counter. That actually makes her smile briefly, but she hurries past the door soon after.

Collie emerges from their home after only a few minutes' worth of wait, both she and Scotch hefting large packs on their backs, the boy towing Snowball along by the hand since Collie has her hands full. "All done?" she asks while shutting the door and locking it.

"Yeah," Loppe answers, offering her own hand for Snowball to take, which he does gladly. He's too scared or confused to ask anything, clinging to a little snowman plushie he's had since he was the size of Cinnamon.

Almost everyone's left already. The quartet is the last to follow along the trodden snow, under the ominous half-silence of wind rustling the pines. They rejoin with Bonnie, Cinnamon and their mother, who Loppe has to take firmly by the hand as well to get her to follow them, and together they delve into the mist that marks the boundary between Snowdin and Waterfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a little chart to help you keep track of bun family's relationships: http://i.imgur.com/dqrePYg.png


	2. Determined Undead

Alphys isn't really having the best day, which is saying something.

First it was the dust on the human's clothes when they left the ruins. Then, the deaths started, each more horrifying than the last since it was just another nail in the metaphorical coffin that read 'shit's fucked'. The Royal Scientist watches in disbelief as each canine member of the Royal Guard falls. Doggo isn't even an official member yet, he's still in training so he doesn't get any armor, and he's the first to become dust.

It's horrible. The snowman is turned to mush, though at least in his case he'll be able to reform himself once he's gathered up enough snow. But everyone else? Their dust just settles into mounds upon the frosted earth, like a trail of morbid bread crumbs trailing in the human's wake. At least they don't disturb the dust, so that's something good, right? Makes it easier to collect later, right? I mean, they can't possibly kill every single monster in the underground, no matter how Determined they are.

Alphys nearly topples right out of her chair with a yelp when her phone rings. Her ringtone being the theme song for Mew Mew Kissy Cutie doesn't help either. The lizard steadies herself again and grabs the buzzing phone with a shaky hand.

Oh no. No no no no, why now of all times?! Talking to her mother is the last thing Alphys wants when there are monsters getting killed left and ri-

...oh.

She gulps nervously and taps a claw on the 'answer' button.

"H-hi, mom." Alphys hasn't called her mother in a long time. She's been avoiding contact with pretty much everyone since...

...yyyeeeaaah. Let's not talk about that.

"Alphys, honey, thank god!" comes the voice from the other side, and the scientist is surprised to hear it sounding afraid, almost panicked, and slightly breathless? "Alph, darling, do you know what's happening in the forest? About the human?"

Her eyes can't help but snap up to the screen in front of her again. The characteristic noise of a monster dissolving into dust comes through the speakers, making her cringe. "Y-yeah, I'm w-watching them right n-now. Why?"

She hears the telltale rush of a breath let out too close to the receiver. "The icedrakes came through Snowdin and warned everyone about them. Ice Village is already empty, and we are leaving too. But we need a place to hide, Alph. Didn't you tell me once there are tunnels under the lab? Could we use them?"

Alphys looks at the elevator disguised as a bathroom. Could they?

The amalgamates are there. They're not dangerous or anything, but they're just... walking, living reminders of her own failure, and the thought of introducing them to the combined population of Ice Village and Snowdin Town and revealing what their fallen relatives have ended up as is... not appealing, to say the least.

But then there's the matter of the human, isn't there? She looks at the screen again. They're up against Dogamy and Dogares- oh. Just Dogamy. And then no one at all.

Yeah, this is _really_ bad.

"Honey?" her mother calls through the phone.

Alphys has to shake her head and take a breath that's supposed to be deep and calming but just comes out shaky instead. "Yeah, I-I..." She glances at the disguised elevator again, but the sound of yet another monster being dusted makes the decision for her. She can deal with the fallout of her past actions when the time comes, but she can't just let them stay in harm's way like this. Not her mother. She's the only family Alphys has.

The Royal Scientist sure wishes she weren't bringing a whole town's worth of monsters along with her though.

Alphys gulps nervously, claws at her forehead, tries to take another steadying breath but only succeeds in forming a sort of weird gasp. "Okay, y-yeah, you can use the u-underground lab to h-hide. C-come to H-Hotland and... I-I guess, bring as m-many people as you c-can along the way?" The mere thought of it is making her sweat. "There's p-plenty of room down th-there, we c-can hide everyone."

Alphys has curled in on herself, drawing her knees up to her chest, wrapping her tail around her ankles, hiding her snout behind her legs. Her mother's next words sound worried. "Alph, is everything alright?"

The lizard shakes her head even though her mother can't see. "Th-there's just some... th-things going on here. W-work stuff. I'll t-tell you when you... g-get here, mom."

There's a few seconds of silence on the other side. "Alright, honey," her mother says finally. "We are on our way there. See you soon, darling."

This time Alphys almost succeeds in taking that deep breath. "Bye, mom."

She taps a claw on the 'end call' button.

God, this day's going to be even worse than when everyone started melting, isn't it? Not by a very wide margin, mind you, that sight was already pretty horrific in its own right, but still. Who knows, though! Maybe this can finally be where she makes a difference! She has to look at the bright side, right? Stay positive and... do her best! Yes, that's what Undyne would tell her probably!

Alphys yelps again when her phone goes off a second time, right in her hand. Goddammit, she really should change her ringtone to something that starts with less of a bang. But the contact this time is someone she doesn't dread speaking to quite as much, at least.

The lizard is sweating for completely different reasons when she taps the 'answer' button a second time. The loud voice that comes through before she even has a chance to say hi forces Alphys, as usual, to hold the phone at arm's length so she doesn't go deaf.

"PAPYRUS JUST CALLED ME ABOUT A WEIRD HUMAN IN THE FOREST AND YOU BETTER HAVE SOMETHING FOR ME OR I SWEAR I'M GOING TO SUPLEX YOU STRAIGHT INTO THE VOID!!!"

"H-Hi, Undyne!" Alphys greets with a trembling smile to herself. "I-I'm watching the human r-right now a-and... yeah, they're n-not very nice."

An even louder 'WHAT?!' comes through the phone, forcing her to snap it away from her ear again before continuing.

"Y-yeah, they, uh... th-their clothes are all d-dusty, a-and they're... k-killing monsters a-and..." She glances up at the screen again. Poor Greater Dog is trying in vain to play with the human. He crumbles right before her eyes. Alphys shuts her eyes tight and braces herself. "...the Snowdin C-canine Unit is g-gone."

She's ready for her phone to explode in her hand, but... it doesn't happen.

The line goes silent, even though the call hasn't ended.

"U-um... Undyne?"

A few more seconds of quiet, and then...

"Alphys." Undyne's voice is almost calm now, but the lizard can feel the cold, calculated _rage_ behind it. "You're going to watch me fight this human, and if anything goes wrong, you're going to evacuate as many people as you can into the old labs, and you're going to call Asgore and tell him to absorb the six human souls." It's not a request, but an order. This is Captain Undyne, not let's-watch-anime Undyne.

Alphys' free hand is fidgeting with a button on her labcoat. "O-okay. A-and, um, actually, Snowdin Town a-and the Ice Village are already e-empty and th-they're c-coming here."

"Good. Keep them safe. Me and Papyrus will make a plan to take down the human." There's a brief pause. "...you stay safe too, Alph." Undyne's voice is lower and just a little bit softer on those last few words.

Despite everything, Alphys feels something warm in her chest. A smile forms on her snout as the sides of it go scarlet. "Y-you too, Undyne." She's about to end the call when she glances up at the screen and her skin whiplashes into pale yellow. "Vernie's still in town!"

" _What?!_ "

Alphys can only watch in horror as the human approaches her little half-brother, but by some miracle he goes unharmed. He even talks to them! What the hell?!

"O-okay, he just... t-talked to the human? B-but he's heading for W-waterfall, so... c-can you keep an eye on him f-for me?"

The Royal Scientist hears a groan through the phone. "Yeah, sure. Dammit, that stupid kid's going to get himself killed." It sounds like Undyne is facepalming. "But I'll keep him safe too, I promise. You just watch and do what I told you."

Alphys nods by reflex. "I-I will, Undyne. B-bye."

The line goes silent for good.

A deep breath of released tension drains out of the lizard. She rubs a hand over her forehead and looks around to relocate herself. Watch Undyne fight, evacuate more people if things go south, a bunch of monsters about to arrive. She should warn the amalgamates about it. Yeah, that's what she'll do. The human's going into the fog right now anyway, she won't be able to see anything while they're in there. Might as well take the chance.

The lizard slides off her seat and shuffles over to the elevator in disguise. The door opens automatically. She steps inside and presses one of the only two working buttons, then waits while the box rumbles around her. It's a long way down, the deeper levels are less damaged than those near the (relative) surface.

Oh god, Snowy's dead too, isn't he? Dammit, how's Alphys supposed to tell that to his mom?! She'll be expecting him to show up with the rest of the icedrakes! The scientist buries her face in her palms and groans.

Today's just turning into one piece of bad news after another, isn't it?

The elevator clunks to a halt. Alphys crouches, pushes a loose panel aside beneath the buttons, presses her hand to the exposed wires, and fuels her electricity magic into them. The elevator hums to life again and resumes its descent. After a while, Alphys stands again. There's this section in the elevator shaft that's out of power, the whole thing just comes loose and falls if she doesn't power it past that part herself. The first time that happened is definitely on her list of 'worst days ever'.

At long last, the rumbling slows and the box around her stops.

The corridor ahead is dim. Damaged wiring aside, the deeper levels of the lab never really got a huge chunk of the power generated by the Core, so everything just ends up bathed in this eerie half-light down here. Alphys is used to it by now though.

Her claws tip-tap quietly along the ceramic floor. As she walks, the screens to her right lit up with the movement, but she ignores them. Why did she ever use them anyway? No point in leaving entries scattered about the place like this. She could've just put them on her phone or something. Stupid idea.

The lizard comes to a halt in front of the vending machine. Mettaton helped her move it down here. She slips some coins in, then bends down and pulls out a few bags of chisps, two on each hand.

"H-hey!" she calls out, shaking the bags. The noise echoes strangely in the ominous silence. "Guys, can you come here, please? I need to talk to you! A-and then you can all have chisps!"

Alphys waits.

Gradually, the sounds of each amalgamate making their way to her reach her ears. The noise was creepy at first, but like with the semi-darkness all around, she's used to it.

A sort of warped, low-pitch bubbling announces the arrival of Lemon Bread with their fang-filled maw. They drag themselves into view and curl up to wait. The goo above their mouth extends into a pair of eyes, which fixate on the chisps hanging off Alphys' claws.

Small, careful steps precede a horned head with a single eye and a large beak. Reaper Bird ducks through a door, wings tucked in tight and head bowed low so it doesn't hit the ceiling. They flash their eye-teeth at Lemon Bread like a cat hissing at a rival, then sit down next to the wall.

Then, labored breathing reaches their ears. A half-molten icedrake with two vegetoids merged into their head rounds a corner, mumbling quietly to themselves about snow. They too settle down, between the first pair of amalgamates. "S...now...y..." they whisper to no one in particular.

Finally, from the vents above comes a low, oscillating noise. A white mist seeps out and coalesces into a large mass, which then grows several legs and lands heavily upon the dusty floor. Endogeny's head forms, already with happiness froth leaking out of the single large hole that is their face. They're quite visibly having trouble staying still as their amorphous body oozes and flows within itself in the lack of a tail to wag.

Alphys starts to gather her breath to speak when one last amalgamate arrives, absolutely silent. The tall, thin, lanky one with a bulbous head just sort of... fades into presence by the far wall and stands there. She's never heard this one make any sort of noise, let alone even seen them much when she comes down.

"Oh. Um, hang on." She buys another bag from the machine before continuing.

"O-okay. So, uh, I have some news for you!" Lemon Bread perks up at that, and Reaper Bird tilts their head curiously. "There's this h-human in Snowdin, and... they're k-killing monsters." Lemon Bread's eyes form again, looking shocked. "The people from Ice Village a-and Snowdin Town got scared, so they're c-coming to hide down here!"

Stunned silence follows, but it's short-lived. A rasping intake of breath draws everyone's eyes to the partially-molten icedrake. "S...now...y..." the amalgam gurgles weakly. Something that might be an attempt at a smile ghosts across her beak.

Alphys averts her eyes. Ooohhh boy. Here we go. She gulps nervously.

"Um... I-I..."

She squeezes her eyes shut and claws at her forehead again. Goddammit, why did Snowy have to be on that forest path?! It's already bad enough his mom's fused with like a bunch of other monsters, and now...

The lizard takes a deep, shaky breath. "I'm sorry, Ms. Drake, b-but... Snowy, he... wasn't far f-from the door to the Ruins a-and... he was one of the f-first to get dusted."

The amalgam seems to almost deflate at that. "S...now...y..." she repeats, but now her voice is distant, faded, even weaker than before.

Alphys' own shoulders sag. "I'm really sorry, Ms. Drake." She looks around at the other amalgamates. Even Endogeny has their face hole turned to the icedrake and their ears folded back, but they quickly snap back to attention when Alphys shakes the bags of chisps. "A-alright guys! That was all I had to say! Thanks f-for coming."

She realizes almost too late what Endogeny's about to do and throws one of the bags at the last second. It vanishes into a large white blur that then zooms away through the door Reaper Bird used earlier. The noise of happy barks, layered over themselves multiple times over, fades away down the hall. The lizard just sighs and hands out the remaining bags. Reaper Bird takes theirs in their beak and ambles off, and Lemon Bread carries it under an arm as they drag themselves along. The tall, featureless amalgam fades out and reappears right in front of Alphys, completely silent as always. It extends a limb, pats her on the head, then engulfs the bag on the end of its sinuous appendage and fades away again. Alphys can't help but shiver. That one still gives her the creeps.

This only leaves the icedrake behind, who is apparently beginning to slowly sag into a featureless mound. The Royal Scientist steps close carefully.

"Ms. Drake?"

The amalgam's eye-mouths and actual eyes turn to her vaguely.

Alphys lowers herself onto the floor and sets down the chisps next to the icedrake. "I could call your husband, i-if you'd like? He's at the MTT Resort, h-he's okay. A-and, he'd like to know you're alive, r-right?"

The amalgam looks like she's having trouble understanding. "Hus...band...?"

The lizard nods emphatically. "Yeah. Mr. Drake, remember? You could comfort e-each other. That'd be nice, w-wouldn't it?"

The icedrake thinks for a moment, then nods and pulls her body back together a little bit. "O...kay..."

Alphy offers her a smile while she fishes out her phone again. The only reason she has the number of every single MTT Resort employee is because Mettaton keeps stealing her phone to call them _even though he has a built-in phone function in his robotic body_ , which will never stop annoying her to no end. Still, at least it's coming in handy now.

"H-hi! Mr. Drake? Th-this is Alphys! The R-royal Scientist? We, uh, m-met a while ago when I was a-asking for monsters that had f-fallen, remember? And I brought y-your wife to the Lab? ...y-yeah, hi. I uh..." The icedrake amalgam is watching her silently, which just makes her sweating worse. "L-look, can you come down to the Lab, please? There's s-something I need to t-talk to you about. ...yeah, s-see you."

Alphys ends the call. Snowy's mother looks marginally better. "O-okay. Um. I'll go up and wait for him, a-and you can stay by the elevator, a-and when he arrives I'll come down to get you, o-okay?"

"O...kay..." the amalgamate agrees slowly.

Together, the pair of them make their way back through the long dark hallway. Alphys has to keep a slow step so the icedrake can keep up. When they reach the elevator, the amalgam settles down beside the door, and the lizard steps in.

The door slides shut.


	3. The Golden Hall

Sans has lost count on how many times he's already killed the kid.

Granted, _he_ hasn't actually killed them even once yet. But his other selves have. The ones before however many resets the kid's made in this golden corridor alone. Thirty? Fifty? The reports are all blurring together at this point.

Heh. "Reports". He hasn't analyzed these glimpses from other timelines in a scientific manner in years, but the name's still there. Old habits die hard and all. A fitting figure of speech for the situation, all things considered. He'd smile if he weren't already grinning like he always is. "Memories" would've implied he'd lived through them, which isn't really true. "Visions" just sounds like made-up bullshit. So "reports" was the only good option he'd come up with back then. If nothing else, it made things feel more professional. More scientific. More in control than they ever really were.

In the present, Sans is simply watching the kid at the start of the corridor, out of sight beyond the furthest column. They're rummaging around in that little box of theirs, no doubt shuffling their food stuffs and equipment around for the hundredth time or so. Just from what few glimpses of their face he catches, he can tell they're at the end of their rope without even needing the reports from the other Sans-es. Must be doing _something_ right, then. Didn't that box used to serve as some sort of weird mail/storage system way back when? Well, it doesn't really matter now. He doubts anyone's going to touch the things after the kid's been clogging them with dust.

Finally, the human gets to their feet. Seems like they ditched the knife this time around in favor of a rusty frying pan? Huh. They hold out their hand in the same spot they do every time, then begin to pace across the golden floor. Like clockwork, they stop at the exact same point as always when he opens his shortcut. Two cracks split the air, one next to him, the other in front of the kid, both ends pitch black for the most infinitesimal fraction of a second before they align to each other and let him through. He stares at the human, always grinning, always with his hands stuffed in his pockets. It annoys them.

"let's just get to the point."

The human scowls, their knuckles go white around the handle of the pan, they bare their teeth like a rabid animal. It's almost like they're trying to match him. He closes his sockets, knowing the human won't attack yet. He knows the words he's meant to say, the words that'll get to them the most. The words they've heard over and over, but that he's speaking for the first time. The magic coils up inside him in preparation for the upcoming release.

"it's a beautiful day outside. birds are singing, flowers are blooming... on days like these, kids like you..."

The first attack is dodged so easily as to be almost comical. Yep. Sure is funny, isn't it? He's even smiling already.

"here we go."

They fall into rhythm. The human attacks. Sans slows down time and steps aside. He says his part and retaliates. Rinse, fucking, repeat. Like the reaper's alarm clock ticking down with each beat of their dance.

"what? you think i'm just gonna stand there and take it?"

Attack, dodge.

"our reports showed a massive anomaly in the timespace continuum. timelines jumping left and right, stopping and starting..."

Attack, dodge.

"until suddenly, everything ends."

Attack, dodge.

"heh heh heh... that's your fault isn't it?"

Attack, dodge.

"you can't understand how this feels."

Attack, dodge.

"knowing that one day, without any warning... it's all going to be reset."

Attack, dodge.

"look, i gave up trying to go back a long time ago."

Attack, dodge.

"and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore, either."

Attack, dodge.

"cause even if we do... we'll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?"

Attack, dodge.

"to be blunt... it makes it kind of hard to give it my all."

Attack, dodge.

"...or is that just a poor excuse for being lazy...? hell if i know."

Attack, dodge.

"all i know is... seeing what comes next... i can't afford not to care anymore."

Attack, dodge. He's getting pretty bone tired (heh).

"ugh... that being said... you, uh, really like swinging that thing around, huh? ...listen. i know you didn't answer me before, but... somewhere in there. i can feel it. there's a glimmer of a good person inside of you. the memory of someone who once wanted to do the right thing. someone who, in another time, might have even been... a friend? c'mon, buddy. do you remember me? please, if you're listening... let's forget all of this, ok? just lay down your weapon, and... well, my job will be a lot easier."

They're both breathing hard. Or as close to breathing as a skeleton gets. The human hasn't healed at all yet, but Sans knows they've done this so many times now they use his offer to patch themselves up instead of wasting time between his attacks. They have a stitch on their side or maybe some cracked ribs that they're clutching; one sleeve of their sweater is hanging in charred tatters to expose a bruised and burned arm; there's a bleeding gash on their forehead painting half of their face red, the side bathed in golden light. They're scowling again, out of pain and frustration and the effort it takes to stand straight.

Sans has sweat beading on his skull. The golden hall is a total mess, the first half more so than the second. There are trails of soot all along the walls and floor, two collapsed columns, a third just barely teetering on a half-crumbled base, and several broken windows, their shattered glass littering the space and sparkling like dew on grass.

The kid reaches for a glamburger. The purple bread covered in shimmering sequins feels radically out of place amidst the carnage, clashing horribly with the gold and red, magenta glitter seeping out the bottom and fluttering to the now dirty yellow tiles. It's just so fucking _funny_ , isn't it? Good old Mettaton, who Papyrus used to love. At least Sans is already smiling, he doesn't have to put in the effort to form the expression again.

The human moves to take a bite out of the thing, but something stops them.

Their hand starts to shake. Their breathing falters. Glitter rains down on their shoes in a gross approximation of the dust already clinging to them. The kid's face scrunches up in some untold emotion, their fingers clench and bury into the burger, squeezing yet more glitter out.

Sans just watches.

Their fist shakes so hard the burger crumbles to the floor. The human looks like they're struggling with something, both their hands are drawn so tight he can see red seeping out from their palms. The kid's teeth are bare again, but this time it's from exertion, from some intense internal conflict that Sans can't really account for in any reports flitting through his skull.

Then the hand covered in glitter moves, still shaking, to the heart-shaped locket hanging off their neck and tears it off, throws it aside so that it bounces noisily away across the wrecked floor and hits the wall. And he feels it. Like a pulse. Invisible, yet blinding. **Determination** . Not aimed at him, but at the human themself somehow. The glimmer, _Frisk's_ glimmer, he reminds himself. It's reacting. To what exactly he doesn't know. The anomaly maybe? Whatever's controlling the kid to make them do all this?

"...you're sparing me?"

The shaking begins to subside. The tight expression changes slowly to one of deepest sorrow and regret. He sees the telltale shimmering of tears, then a single one clears a path through the soot and blood and lands upon the broken tiles. A sob that seems to well up from the kid's very core rocks their beaten frame. And finally, with an echoing clang, the half-melted frying pan hits the ground, bounces, clatters for a moment, and stills. The silence is only broken by the kid's continued sobs and the almost inaudible noise of falling tears, and then they nod, just a slight tilt of the head up and down as their arms wrap around them, the burned one underneath the other.

"finally. buddy. pal. i know how hard it must be... to make that choice. to go back on everything you've worked up to. i want you to know... i won't let it go to waste."

The kid's shivering now, from pain and exhaustion. The glimmer's strong, but it seems... fragile?... at the same time. They nod again subtly, then take a shaky step forward. And another.

"...c'mere, pal."

Sans holds out his arms in an invitation for a hug. He lets the kid cover about half the distance between them before his eye flickers and a cluster of long, sharp bones materializes behind them. Then his arm jerks back.

A wet, muffled crunch rings out with the first impact, followed by four others, and the human's cry of pain is cut short when blood rushes into their lungs. They stumble and crash onto their knees, five long bones speared through their torso; two on either side of their chest, one through a shoulder, the rest in their gut, with the ends dripping already. The human tries to breathe and blood wells up in their throat instead, they buckle forward and it splatters across the tiles, the ends of their own broken bones scrape against the magic ones with every spasm that runs through them until the lack of blood flow and oxygen engulfs them in blackness and they collapse with one final choked gasp.

Sans points fingerguns at the now limp human and grins wider. "geeettttttt dunked on!!!" He stuffs his hands in his pockets again. "if we're really friends... you won't come back."

He waits. Any moment now. Another Sans will pick up from here after the human resets for... what? The hundredth time by now? Who even cares.

The bones dissolve into mist and vanish. From the ragged hole closest to the kid's heart, a few wisps of brilliant red begin to rise and quickly turn into a stream that hovers over the body and coalesces into a large heart shape, glowing and faintly see-through. The soul shakes violently for a second until it splits exactly down the middle and stills, cracks spreading out toward the edges.

Yep. Here it comes.

...

Aaany second now.

...

Wait.

The two halves start to shake again. The glow flickers, but the glimmer of Frisk's presence is stronger and more vulnerable than ever without their body in the way. The soul snaps back together audibly, but the shaking never stops. If anything, it gets stronger. The soul is convulsing almost.

Huh. There's something new. Sans doesn't remember any reports showing anything like this. He already knows that it's the soul shattering that triggers the reset, or at least that's what it looks like from the outside, but he's pretty sure he's never seen it just knit itself back together like that. His head tilts to the side a little as he watches.

A black line slashes across the soul exactly down the middle, but the heart doesn't split, even when similarly black, tendril-like cracks start to snake outward across the surface of the soul. Always shaking wildly, the heart's glow flickers madly as the black crawls to a stop, then recedes, first back to the original line and then into nothing at all.

The light almost goes out as several new dark lines cross the soul in quick succession, splitting the red into polygonal chunks, and still the heart doesn't shatter. These, too, recede slowly, but they seem to merge into a single, thicker black line that, while following along the former split, doesn't reach the edges of the red. It just stays there in the center of the soul, refusing to budge, as the heart rattles and spasms in place, its shine blinking in and out like a badly-wired light bulb.

The kid's glimmer is fading. Acting on instinct, Sans holds out a hand and envelops the soul in blue. Thankfully, the shaking stops. Mostly. The heart is still vibrating ever-so-slightly, apparently struggling against his hold, but he just pulls his hand in and the soul comes to hover above his palm. He can feel Frisk inside. It's strange how weak they are if this is their soul. Whatever was controlling them can't be good news.

"heh. guess you really were my friend after all, huh? shame." Sans stares at the blue-wreathed heart. His smile falters, too briefly to be visible, then his sockets flicker to the small, wrecked body now lying in a pool of blood.

"sorry about the heartbreak, kid. it's not you, and it sure as hell ain't me either. it's the creep that keeps breaking into your house and calling me at 3 in the morning. you understand, right?" He looks back at the soul, but his gaze focuses on the black line. It's still there, looking almost solid as opposed to the heart's immaterial transparency. His brow creases momentarily, but then he shrugs.

"welp. guess i better take you to asgore then."


	4. Tea and Souls

Asgore has never seen a talking flower before.

To him, this is just like every other day. He got up in what passes for morning in the underground and walked by the closed door to Toriel's old room. He made himself breakfast and drank some tea, read a book, tried and failed yet again to copy his wife's famous butterscotch pie, adding another crumpled piece of paper to the already overflowing garbage bin in the kitchen. Business as usual. Nothing special, as far as the king is concerned.

After lunch he goes out to the throne room to tend to his garden, and that's when it happens. He's moving around sedately, sweeping the watering can back and forth, always careful not to step on the large golden flowers, and he hears a small, high-pitched voice behind him and to his right. "D- Asgore! They're coming, you have to run!"

When he turns around, it's to find a face amidst the sea of petals, a face twisted in fear that seems vaguely familiar. "Oh! Howdy! I don't believe we've met before?" He sets the watering can aside and kneels, but the flower just shakes its disc in desperation.

Are those tears in its eyes?

"No, you idiot! You need to run, hide, _something_! Ch- they, the human, they w-" Suddenly the flower notices something behind him, squeals in terror, and sinks into the ground.

The king just frowns. "How odd," he muses aloud as he rises to his feet and turns to face the entrance. "Ah, Sans! What can I do for you to...day..." Asgore's smile falters and melts away when he realizes what the skeleton's brought. Sans' own grin  is nowhere to be found, and he instead bears a tired, resigned look. The blue magic makes it blend in with his hoodie, but it's right there, hovering over his metacarpals.

A human soul. With a strange black line through its core?

"Oh dear. What has happened, Sans?"

The skeleton shakes his head briefly. "bad draw on the timeline cards, 'gore. lot of dead monsters. had to use some heavy artillery to take'em down, the corridor back there's a mess."

They're both looking at the soul when Asgore's brow furrows. He's never quite managed to wrap his head around the whole concept of multiple simultaneous timelines flowing in parallel. Even Sans' analogy with the pages of a book didn't help all that much. Letters were events, decisions, random chances, and their arrangement on each page was different, and the pages branched off and merged with one another at random. Something along those lines. It's all very complicated, but the king understands enough to know what Sans means. Add that to the warning he's just received from the flower, and...

"I see. This iteration of the human was... _bad_ , then?" His question is hesitant, and the skeleton's shrug in response isn't reassuring.

"can't say for sure. the thing's getting pretty frisky here, though, better put it in the pod." True to his word, the heart is vibrating a little bit harder with every second it stays under the hold of his blue magic.

Asgore nods, now looking sorrowful. "Yes, of course. Come along." He turns and leads the way.

The barrier is the same as ever. A great wall of magic blocking the wide cavern path, more solid than the rock around it and yet shifting and ebbing and flowing eternally like disturbed fog, the tunnel beyond tantalizingly visible through the shimmering mist in faded greys. Asgore prods at a tiny little controller device hidden under his cape, and the seven pods rise through the floor. Sans steps close to the empty one and hovers the soul above it.

The pod activates on its own and lights up, then a small hatch opens at the top. The heart is sucked in like mist, then reforms and starts rattling all over again, flickering so severely the red almost goes out several times. A deep electrical hum emanates through the floor as the pod attunes itself to the soul's energy, then a brief static-filled hiss rings out. The top and bottom of the pod glow red. With the stasis activated, the heart's shaking slows and, finally, stops. The soul is now frozen in time. The black line through its center still refuses to budge.

Asgore sweeps his gaze across all seven filled pods, but Sans is still watching the red one. A deep sigh drains out of the king, drawing the skeleton's sockets to him for a moment. "better wait before using these, 'gore." He indicates the red soul with his chin. "that one was pretty unstable when i grabbed it. lot of dust to take care of too. people are scared." The goat monster nods vaguely, then huffs under his breath and straightens himself with a deep breath.

"Yes. An announcement is in order. The human's death must be broadcasted to the population." He turns to face Sans. Asgore still looks sad, but his kingly manner is mostly back. And, secretly, he's glad he didn't have to get his hands dirty again. Which brings a certain matter back to the forefront of his mind, and his shoulders sag a little again. "But... I must tend to the human's body first. If you'll just give me a moment, Sans?"

The skeleton simply shrugs again, still watching the red heart in thought. "whatever floats your goat, 'gore."

The king can't bring himself to even form a smirk. He just turns around and walks away. Along the way, he grabs the forgotten watering can and puts it away behind his throne.

The dull grey corridor before the golden hall feels even more lifeless than usual; it's the main reason why Asgore had the elevators installed in such a way near the entrance to the castle. The grey stone of the capital reminds him too much of death and dust.

The golden light sparks off his armor as he steps into the hall, glinting like fireflies upon the dark-gray metal. The place really is a mess. It's strange how such a small, frail human could be the reason behind so much damage, so many monsters turned to dust. He doesn't even know how many yet, but the mere sight of the wrecked corridor speaks volumes of the kind of disaster it'd take for Sans to get so deeply involved. The skeleton is usually nothing but a watcher. He relays information to Asgore on how the general populace is doing and that's it.

The king's eyes land on the great pool of red in the center of the hall. He can't help but wince. It's not a pretty sight, regardless of the blood. But Asgore can't just leave them here, so he carefully bunches his cape under one arm and picks his way across the glass-strewn floor until he's at the very edge of the cooling blood.

He stops. The corners of his mouth tug into a sorrowful smile. The human looks so much like Chara it's uncanny.

"Howdy."

Asgore crouches, always mindful to not touch the blood. That's the last thing he wants. Thankfully he's big enough that he can reach the human without doing so. With a claw he brushes the hair out of the child's face, his touch gentle and feather-light. They're pale from the blood loss, but he can tell their skin was darker than Chara's in life. His half-smile fades.

"Forgive me for this. I wish it didn't have to be this way, human. Perhaps... we could've had some tea together?"

The king draws his hand back. His eyes focus on the dust still clinging to the child's clothes. Asgore hums under his breath.

"Well, I suppose this time around your fate may have been justified."

A new sigh drains out of him. Slowly, the king unclasps the cloak from under his golden pauldrons and uses it to scoop up the body. He's not really a fan of this particular indigo anyway. Not since Toriel left. In a way, it's fitting that he's swathing a dead child in her color. For a moment, he wonders where she might be, but then pushes the thought aside. This isn't the time for that.

With the human cradled safely in his arms, the king turns back and retraces his steps, though this time he goes past the entrance to the throne room and down the adjacent flight of stairs. He hasn't touched Chara's old coffin since he found it disturbed in what now seems an infinite time ago, but using it now feels right.

It's not hard to keep the body steady with only one arm while he pushes the lid off with the other. Asgore lowers the human into the empty casket. He arranges the indigo cloth around them as best as he can, wipes the blood off their face with one end of it, tidies up their hair to the best of his ability. He can almost fool himself that the child is merely sleeping.

A single, shining tear rolls down his muzzle and loses itself into his beard.

"It was nice to meet you. Goodbye."

He fits the lid back on. His eyes sweep along the row of coffins. Seven humans. Seven souls. The last one at what cost? He's yet to find out.

Asgore closes his eyes and takes a long, deep breath to steady himself. He wipes the tear track away as he turns away. There is a speech to be made, plans to be arranged. They need to find out what's wrong with the most recent soul as soon as possible so he can use it to open the barrier. With so many deaths, keeping the people from losing hope will be harder than ever. And before anything else, he needs to know exactly how much damage was done, how many lives have been lost. If only Alphys would answer his calls...

When the king returns to the throne room, the short skeleton is waiting for him, still apparently lost in thought even as he looks up at Asgore. "Thank you for waiting, Sans. Do you have any idea how many monsters have been lost?"

The skeleton shakes his head. "nope. alph's got her cameras though."

The king nods. He doesn't really like going around with just his armor, it's too imposing, but getting a new cloak can wait. "Then take me to the Laboratory. I need to speak with her."

Sans just turns away. Asgore sets a hand on his shoulder. "sure thing, 'gore."

While the skeleton opens his shortcut he puts his smile back on for a moment, but then it melts away again. Not the time for it. The black rift in space expands until it's big enough for the king to pass comfortably. Boiling air reaches them when it aligns with Hotland, and they step through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yes, this thing's gonna be a collection of short scenes from the point of view of different characters. Should be fun to play with. I've already got a few cliffhangers in mind to make with this format~


	5. Meeting the Undead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AKA in which there is A Lot Of Talking

Sans hasn't gone out in public without wearing his smile in a _long_ time.

It feels strange. Almost like he's naked. But, all things considered, it'd just be insensitive to go around smiling like that with dead monsters all over the place. And, to be honest, he was only smiling while fighting the kid because he actually felt a semblance of release, of catharsis, for once. He could just... let loose, finally. He's always bottling himself up, it felt downright liberating to be able to use his abilities to their full potential again.

The door to the Laboratory opens automatically for the goat monster and the skeleton when they get close. But it opens to a dark room. The lights come on when they step inside, but it's all empty. The large surveillance screen is split into multiple smaller displays, each showing the viewpoint of a different camera in Hotland.

"looks like alph's been working her tail off," Sans comments idly.

Every single camera is showing an empty room or area. There's not a single monster present in the main road through Hotland, even if there are still plenty of dust mounds dotting the path. The king looks around, puzzled, then steps close to the massive screen to examine it and realizes what Sans means. "Has she been evacuating monsters?"

"yep." Sans moves past Asgore, to the computer covered in sticky notes. He nudges the mouse to make the screen come to life, then begins to type and click his way through applications and programs, most dealing with the management of Hotland as a whole and the camera system. Asgore comes to stand behind him in the meantime to watch over his head.

"she blocked off most of this sector with forcefields and diverted power to the old labs... so they must be under us," the skeleton concludes, and just as he's stepping away a mechanical noise announces the opening of the doors disguised as a bathroom.

A scaly hand grips the edge of the wall. A creamy-orange snout follows shortly after, peeking around it.

"Hi, A-Asgore. And, uh, Sans." Alphys steps into view a little. "W-what are you doing h-here? What about the h-human?"

"dead," Sans replies simply. The king nods in confirmation.

"O-oh."

Asgore's smile to the lizard is bitter, though Sans suspects it was probably meant to be comforting instead. The guy sure doesn't like thinking about dead kids, does he? "Alphys. Thank you for the evacuation. I had no idea what was going on," the king says.

Alphys blushes beet red all along the sides of her snout and looks away. "Y-yeah, um... you're w-welcome, I guess. Undyne t-told me..." Here the scientist's face scrunches up, as though she's holding something back, and when her eyes open again they're full of sorrow.

Yep, Undyne's dead. Sure put it one hell of a fight, though.

Alphys glances at the king before retreating into the elevator. "You should c-come down, Asgore. There's s-something you need to see," she calls from inside after she's out of sight.

The goat monster's brow furrows and he looks at Sans for clarification, but the skeleton just shrugs. "i'll take a shortcut, 'gore. that thing can't take all three of us together."

A slight smirk tugs at the corner of Asgore's mouth. "Very well." The king has to almost double over to fit inside the elevator, the whole thing groans with the weight but thankfully holds. The doors close and the elevator rumbles downward.

Sans lingers for a few moments, sockets on the surveillance screen. One of the camera views is still showing the spot where Undyne fell, the mound of wet, sticky dust that was once the Captain of the Royal Guard. If he had to guess, he'd say those are tears dotting the floor below that particular section of the screen.

The skeleton looks away. No point in crying. His fingers toy with a ragged orange cloth caked in dust in his pocket, but then he pulls his hand out, opens a shortcut to the underground passage, and steps through. The long corridor is well lit now thanks to the extra power.

The elevator arrives shortly after with a quiet 'ding'. When Alphys comes out and sees Sans already there, she frowns in annoyance. He's never let her see what his shortcuts look like. Rather than comment on it though, she just walks past him, still dragging her tail morosely. Both he and Asgore follow close behind.

Are those voices?

When they round the corner, Sans can see groups of monsters ahead, speaking amongst themselves. The overall tone of the conversations sounds light and upbeat as usual, but there's this tension in the air, like noxious mist hanging over everyone's heads, a mixture of fear and dread that, like the omnipresent claustrophobia and loneliness, the monsters hide as well as possible.

The trio stops at the mouth of the corridor, and one by one the monsters present go silent. Sans can hear Asgore's quiet rumble of... _something_ under his breath, like a hum, but only because he's standing right next to the king.

"Greetings," the goat monster says solemnly. The skeleton almost grins to himself again. Heh. The king always mimics Toriel when things are serious. "Dear citizens, you may relax. The human has been dealt with." There's a collective and almost audible sigh of relief. Sans can see the faint smile that crosses Asgore's muzzle. "Yes, you are safe now. But I will arrange an official statement soon, I promise. I must first consult with the Royal Scientist." He gestures to Alphys, who just gives a half-hearted wave. "Please, wait here."

And with that, Alphys takes the lead again through the scattered groups of families and friends, followed always by Asgore and Sans bringing up the rear, almost unnoticed in the king's shadow.

They pass through a door and go down another long corridor, until they reach a large, mostly empty space. The beds that used to be arranged in neat rows across the spacious floor have been pushed to the walls to give the occupants as much room as possible. There are three groups of monsters here, each gathered around one of the amalgamates created by Alphys. Only Endogeny is huddled in a corner by itself. The amalgam with Snowy's mother's personality not only has her husband with her, but also the rabbit family from Snowdin. Their father's in the amalgam, isn't it? Sans isn't completely sure. Then there's Reaper Bird, surrounded by some astigmatisms, whimsalots and froggits, and Lemon Bread gurgling with a group of moldsmal and an aaron.

Sans already knew about them, of course. The amalgams. He even steps over to Endogeny in its shadowy corner and pets it. Or as close to petting as one can get when dealing with semi-solid sludge in the shape of a multi-limbed canine. "all gone, huh?" The amalgamate makes a warped, gurgling sort of noise that might be its attempt at a whine. Sans nods in agreement anyway. "yeah. me too," he mutters quietly, then peeks over his shoulder.

Asgore looks surprised, but Alphys is fidgeting with her labcoat's buttons again.

More than happy to just stay out of it, the skeleton hops up onto one of the nearby beds ringing the room and sits at the edge of the mattress. The dog amalgam lays its faceless head across his lap, still making those strange attempts at sad noises, and he idly rests a hand between its ears while watching the king and the Royal Scientist. Sans' sockets are blank and lifeless.

Man, Alphys is just about ready to tear her labcoat to shreds if she keeps fidgeting with it like that. Asgore hasn't realized what the goopy monsters mean yet, though. He even waves at them in greeting. "Howdy! I don't believe we've met before?"

Lemon Bread just makes a bubbling noise and looks away. The icedrake amalgam responds with a little smile, a wave of her own, and a raspy 'he...llo...'. Reaper Bird squawks out a completely unintelligible jumble of words layered over each other.

Asgore's gaze shifts to Alphys in search of some kind of explanation, but the lizard looks like she's barely holding it together. Her stuttering is worse than ever when she starts rattling off words like a machine gun, hands moving to clutch at her head, claw at her scales, knock off her glasses noisily. It doesn't take long for Sans to see tears rolling down her snout from under her palms.

"W-w-when I g-got those m-monsters that had f-fallen down I-I-I s-started inj-jecting them with D-determ-mination t-to see w-what would happen, a-a-and they w-woke up, b-but then everyone started m-m-melting together, they c-couldn't h-handle it, a-a-and now they t-turned into th-these guys and I-I have n-no idea h-how to f-fix it-" She's cut off by a sob that rattles her whole frame. "A-a-and n-now, U-U-Undyne's d-dead and- *sob* P-P-Papyrus t-too- *sob* a-and so m-m-many o-others- *sob* a-a-and i-it's all my fault!"

And then Alphys just breaks down into uncontrollable tears. Her arms fold over her head and she curls up on herself, tail wrapping around her ankles, face and snout completely hidden by her arms and knees as her body convulses with ever grief-wracked sob that surfaces.

Sans just sits by and watches.

The lizard yelps when she's suddenly enveloped in metal. Asgore is kneeling and has his arms around her in the best comforting hug he can manage while wearing full-body armor. It's not much, and for a moment Alphys hesitates out of sheer shock, but then she just leans into his breastplate and starts crying all over again, somehow even harder than before. Even though Sans can just barely see her face over Asgore's armored bicep, it's impossible to miss her radiant blush. The skeleton is too far away to hear her half-formed whispers, but the king's deep voice still carries easily across the semi-silence even in a low volume.

"Shhhh. Calm down, Alphys. Breathe. I am sure you had the best of intentions with your experiments." There's a brief but audible scraping of claws on metal. "And your evacuation efforts helped save countless lives. Does that not count for anything?" It takes a while of soothing reassurances until Alphys starts to get a hold of herself. When her sobs begin to peter out, Asgore lets go and pulls back. It's the king's hands on her shoulders that draw her wet eyes up to him. "Alphys, you've done the best you could, and that is all any of us can ever do. Remember that, alright?"

Alphys is quite clearly trying to contain her tears now, with partial success. She nods a little shakily. "Y-ye-eah, okay. I-I will."

The rest of the grouped onlookers turn back to their own matters once Alphys starts pulling herself back together. She wipes at her face with her sleeves. Asgore carefully picks up her glasses between two fingers and hands them to her, to which she says a timid little 'th-thanks' and perches them on her snout again. With his hand still on her shoulder, she takes a few deep breaths.

Sans slides off his seat and turns to Endogeny. "hey pal, why don't you stay with them?" He indicates the bunny family and the icedrake couple with his head. "they knew your folks well."

The amalgam just makes that weird gurgly noise again, leans its head on Sans one last time, then ambles off and immediately sinks its weight into the closest bunny, who just so happen to be Loppe the shopkeeper. She starts to protest vehemently, making everyone else in the group laugh.

Sans merely wanders back over to the king and the Royal Scientist. He hasn't smiled since he arrived at the Lab, and he's not about to now.

Asgore is getting to his feet again when the skeleton reforms their trio. "I'm afraid we must get to business now, Alphys. Is there anywhere we can talk in private?"

The lizard nods. "Yeah, th-this way." She walks past Asgore and starts retracing their steps. "I set up a r-remote surveillance station down h-here, we can t-talk there." They go back to the main hub they'd first reached, where Alphys rounds the corner and steps into a second elevator with two doors. This one's a bit bigger, and since Sans doesn't know exactly where she's headed and wouldn't want all the monsters present to see him use his shortcut, he slips in as well.

It's a tight fit. Alphys even has trouble pressing the right button, but then the doors slide shut and they move up instead of down. Thankfully the ride is shorter than the last.

The elevator comes to a halt and opens. Sans is the first one out.

Ah. Of course. His and Gaster's old office. Well, only his, as far as everyone else is concerned. Makes sense that Alphys would bunk down in here. Sans looks around with a vague sense of nostalgia. He hasn't actually worked in the Lab in years, he stopped not long after he stopped trying to keep a consistent catalog of his reports.

The place is a complete mess, almost exactly how he left it, with the exception of a path cleared through the old detritus of junk food to the desk and the light of the working computer casting deep shadows across the bookshelf behind it. Heh. His old science books. He never did come back to get more of them, did he? Shame. There are filing cabinets on either side of the shelves crammed so full of papers the corners are all spilling over the top of the drawers, and faded posters of stars, constellations, schematics for magic-based machinery and other sciency things tacked up on the wall. The room is dark. The only source of light is the computer itself.

The other half of the room, the one to their right, is completely empty.

"I-I'm sorry, Sans, I had to use y-your computer," Alphys says as she shuffles past the skeleton and to the desk.

He merely shrugs. "ain't no skin off my back." He follows her and puts his back against one of the filing cabinets, making it creak loudly.

Asgore, who has to stay hunched over so he won't scrape his horns on the ceiling, goes around the other side and chooses instead to sit on a mostly clean patch of floor. "I'm sorry to broach the subject like this, Alphys," the king starts, "but the priority right now is to deal with those that have fallen victim to the human. Can you give me a number of deaths, or an estimate?"

The lizard nods. "I-I think so. I s-set up a program to a-automatically count them, a-and the d-dust piles that were a-already there. It should give us a-a good estimate of how many m-monsters were lost." Her claws tap across the keyboard to bring up two windows, one cycling through the camera views that contain at least one mound of monster dust, and the other showing a simple numerical output divided by each region of the Underground. The Ruins are only identified by a single question mark, but the program offers an estimate of 50 deaths for Snowdin and Waterfall each, and a gut-wrenching 200 for Hotland and the Core combined. "W-we don't have any cameras i-in the Ruins," she adds.

And then, they hear a voice coming from the blank side of the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand here we have our first real cliffhanger at the end of a chapter~  
> I promise it won't last long, don't worry, and no, the voice is definitely not who you think it is.


	6. Humans, Monsters, Flower

The monster-turned-flower hasn't had this much fun in aaages.

After Chara agrees to Flowey's plan, he himself springs into action. While the human works through the main path, Flowey goes to the less-known corners to pick off stragglers. He'd rather not draw attention to himself at such a critical moment. Hard to break the habit, he supposes. Either way, he gets to work, and between each short killing spree he doubles back to secretly check on Chara's progress. They're not wandering far from the main road, but they're still doing quite a bit of damage. They single-handedly get rid of the entire Snowdin Canine Squad, not even the idiot who smokes dog treats escaped! He was the first of them to die! Flowey had to fight to keep his laughter in check so he wouldn't be noticed.

When he tries to get ahead, however, and decimate the Snowdin Town residents, he finds the place completely empty?

That's just weird. And he hasn't really been focusing on the feedback from his vines, what with all the (fake) excitement of having Chara back, so he has no idea what happened.

Over his many resets, his actions were undone each time, but not his physical growth. By now he has roots and vines pretty much everywhere in the underground, and he can feel what's going on through the vibrations in the earth and nothing else. Like a spider, sort of? Don't spiders do something like that with their webs?

Whatever. It doesn't matter, and he doesn't care.

Eventually, Chara reaches the now empty town and the foggy riverside road where Papyrus waits. Flowey places himself between them, still underground but close enough to both hear and feel clearly what's going on, and he has to contain his giggles almost the entire time.

Papyrus is trying to convince them to stop, seriously?! Hah! Oh, he wants so bad to just reach up with his vines and _crush_ the idiot, but no. This is Chara's kill, and boy, do they deliver! They keep interrupting Papyrus by walking toward him, at one point they even stop right on top of Flowey and the not-monster has to hold his laughter again.

And then they come right up to the skeleton and Flowey can't help but pop up behind them, and Papyrus sees him, and Flowey tilts his disc and smiles and waves with a leaf just as Chara slashes right through the skeleton's neck. His body collapses into dust, his skull tumbles off and lands on the snow, already starting to lose mass at the edges, and the idiot somehow is still confident Chara can change, hah!

The crunch that rings out when Chara crushes Papyrus' head under their heel is the most satisfying noise Flowey's heard in _forever_.

Now, on to Waterfall.

He and the human get back into rhythm. This time that armless kid from Snowdin is hanging out with Chara for some reason, what was his name again? Vern, right? Something like that. His presence makes it a little harder to stay unseen when keeping up with the human, so Flowey switches to just tracking their vibrations through his vines instead while he's out and about.

Undyne keeps trying to intercept Chara, to no avail, until the very last time.

Flowey's just watching an aaron crumble to dust in his vines when he suddenly feels steps like an earthquake rushing toward him and he almost doesn't have the time to sink underground. The Royal Captain thunders past, almost directly over him, he actually has to encase himself in vines so the rock and earth doesn't give in around him.

Then Flowey's off, slithering through the stone after Undyne. He can't find Chara or the monster kid when he feels forward, dammit, where are they?! His only option is to keep up with the Captain and hope she's heading where he needs to go.

Along the way, Flowey's chase suddenly comes to a screeching halt. A... _something_ , he can't put a name to it, tears through his plant body. It's like an electrical shock that completely stuns him, an earthquake that rocks him to his very core, a wave of heat that incinerates him.

Worry grips his not-heart. He has no idea what to call the feeling itself, but somehow he just _knows_ what caused it.

A reset. Chara's reset, of multiple timelines. _Frick_.

Flowey shoots forward again, but Undyne's quaking step suddenly vanishes. When Flowey pops up where it stopped he finds himself at a little-known ledge where he doesn't even have a proper network of roots. Below him is a long chasm across the blue rock, over which one of the many bridges of Waterfall sits. And there, right in the middle, are three people. The monster kid, then Undyne with a great big slash cutting clean across her chest and armor, and finally Chara themself.

Well. Um. Okay. That's not bad, right?

Even from here he can see dust seeping out through the gash on Undyne's armor, but she just stands there, shaking, refusing to buckle, and just as she's sagging the dust stops flowing.

Light, a bright red glow floods from the slash on her chest instead, blindingly bright, so much that Flowey has to look away and cover his disc with a leaf.

When he looks down again, Undyne is changed. She's not leaking dust anymore, there isn't even any sign of the wound, the armor itself is whole again and different, more wicked-looking. And man, the fight that follows is _intense_.

That has to be why he felt the reset just now. It's pretty obvious that Chara knows exactly what to do despite this being, from his perspective, the first time they're fighting this strangely powerful version of Undyne. Zombie Undyne? She did die, didn't she? Whatever. There are spears flying everywhere and Chara just blocks or dodges them expertly, knowing exactly when to take a moment to wolf down a cinnamon bunny or to brace themselves for the iron hold of green magic.

Soon enough, Undyne goes down finally, and she seems to almost melt rather than crumble? So weird. Still, it's another obstacle out of the way. That's all that matters.

Time to move on to Hotland.

Here the novelty is starting to wear just a little bit thin. Flowey begins to merely envelop his victims in vines and crush them, quick and simple. That lets him rack up a lot more kills, even if Chara stays at mostly the same rate. Mettaton has a dramatic transformation too, but he goes down in even less time than Papyrus. What a wimp.

He and Chara are so close to their goal, Flowey can't wait. He actually gets a little emotional! It's so strange. He's so close to release, to escaping this loveless hell. Flowey can hardly believe it. In New Home, his old house, he actually starts following Chara above ground and telling them what happened after the two of them got back underground and died.

And then, he says the thing that makes the coin drop in his mind.

They wouldn't hesitate to kill each other.

Neither of them can love. They're cooperating because their current goals are the same, but ultimately, that's the only thing making them partners. It'd be nothing, just striking down the other to continue pursuing their own agendas.

Fear blossoms in Flowey's stem. Actual, physical, gut-wrenching _terror_.

He can't reset anymore, not with Chara in the underground. If he dies, then that's it. No more toying with monsters. No more watching from the shadows. No more playing with the Echo Flowers or Papyrus or Asgore or anyone. No more being with Chara because _Chara would've been the one to kill him_.

Flowey sinks underground and, from here on out, goes back to stalking Chara unseen.

All the while, his mind is scrambling for answers. What should he do?! He can't fight them, he'd just get obliterated. He can't change their mind once they're set on something either, he knows that all too well.

Flowey can't... he can't do anything, can he?

He's... he's powerless.

Flowey hasn't felt anything even remotely close to this in so long he can't even remember the last time it happened. Tears well up in his eyes, how is he even crying?! He's a flower! This is so stupid!!!

When they reach the start of the golden hall, another reset that isn't his crashes through him, even worse than the first.

He can feel every single timeline that's been prematurely ended in this corridor alone, there's so many it almost overwhelms him for a few moments, he has to stop and reorient himself.

But why? There's no one else ahead, it's just As-

Oh.

Oh no.

Flowey snakes ahead under the tiles to get a better feel for it.

Yep. The smiley trashbag is there behind a column. Waiting.

 _Frick_.

This can't be happening. He's good, Flowey knows exactly how much damage he can do, but the guy has so little stamina he can't possibly hope to outlast Chara's Determination. And yet Flowey feels, clear as day, when he steps through one of his stupid shortcuts and starts delivering his weird little speech.

And they fight, Chara and Sans.

Flowey has to cower by the wall so he's not hit by the blasts and bones through the tiles. It's just like the fight with Undyne. Chara knows exactly what to do, they're not perfect but Flowey can tell they've done this a million times, just their expression speaks volumes to it when he pops up briefly behind a pillar to take a peek. They've done this fight for what might as well be hundreds of times, and the cold rage in their eyes is the scariest thing he's seen so far.

Chara isn't even smiling anymore! Flowey knows for a fact that they _really_ mean business when their smile goes away.

The fight rages on, but out of nowhere it stops. Both the skeleton and Chara look tired, and the latter's pretty beat up. It's when they grab a glamburger that pure, undiluted panic grips his lack of a soul again and he dives underground and curls up on himself, stem and leaves wrapping tight around his disc.

No no no, Chara's gonna kill Sans and then Asgore and then _him_ and oh god he doesn't want to die, why is this happening?! He can't just sit idly, he has to do something, but what?!

Confronting Chara directly is out of the question, and the trashbag might as well be dead already. That leaves only Asgore, but the king's too nice, he has the souls but he'll never agree to absorb them in time, goddammit!

Flowey uncoils himself a little. As little of an effect it might have, Asgore is his only option.

He snakes away under the golden corridor without even feeling around. He feels ahead instead, and of course the king is in the garden, that's where the idiot always is, with his stupid plants. Flowey stops close to Asgore's throne, but he has to take a moment to try and pull himself together, except that he _can't_. He's gasping for air, his eyes keep swimming with unbidden tears, and he's pretty sure that his heart would be racing if he had one, instead there's just this... awful staticky feeling in his stem like when one of your limbs falls asleep.

Dammit, he'll just have to suck it up and do it like this, won't he?

But the attempt goes wrong. He's just about to really drop the metaphorical bomb on Asgore when he notices movement, something blue behind the king. He panics and hurriedly sinks underground, only to pop up again under the safety of the throne so he can see what's going on.

Oh, it's Sans. With...

...with Chara's soul.

So he...

...

He did it, then.

Flowey almost gasps audibly, but he catches himself in time.

No, he has to see this for himself.

The flower dives and retraces his path to the golden hall. He finds the still weight resting in the middle of it, and pops up through a broken gap in the ruined tiles. And there's Chara, lying in a pool of blood, beaten and broken.

For a moment, Flowey can only stare silently, completely stunned. He wipes his tears away almost without realizing it. Chara's... dead again. A small part of him feels sad, another is relieved that he's not in danger anymore. Why didn't they reset? Did Sans stop them from doing so somehow? That can't be it. Blue magic can't stop a reset, he knows that well enough. He doesn't really have any idea what else could've caused Chara's reset to fail.

...wait, can _he_ reset now?

Flowey's eyes close and he reaches where his soul should be, to his stolen Determination, that formless energy filling every cell in his little plant body. He lets it flow and ripple outward like invisible tendrils, reaching for the threads that make up everything, the threads that form magic and separate the void from reality.

But no, it doesn't work. Chara's dead, but their Determination is still stronger. The mere presence of their soul in the Underground is enough to grant them total control over the timelines.

He can't do it.

A heavy set of steps approaching the far entrance of the hall snaps Flowey out of it.

Asgore is on his way, so Flowey sinks underground and snakes past the king, to where he can feel the skeleton's weight beyond the throne room.

He waits for Sans to move away from the soul pods, then for both he and Asgore to vanish entirely before popping back up right by the soul pods. The king forgot to move them back to the basement, where they're protected.

Flowey's facing the red pod, of course. He doesn't care about the others. A vine extends from the ground and touches the glass carefully.

It's... warm. Flowey could swear he feels a pulse behind it and everything, like a living thing.

His vine lengthens and wraps loosely around the pod, even gives it an experimental squeeze to test the strength of the glass, but he pulls away shortly after.

Even if he took the other souls, then what? It'd be too risky without the ability to reset. He can't do anything drastic until he has that back. How exactly he's going to get it back he has no idea, but for now it's best to play it safe. The burden of his newfound mortality is annoyingly present in his mind.

Flowey closes his eyes again and lets his mind expand far and wide across his root system. He wants to find the trashbag and the king to keep an eye on them, but something else gets his attention first. There's suddenly a lot of movement in the old lab area under Hotland. He hasn't been paying attention to that place at all, his viney presence there isn't even very thick so he can't tell what exactly is going on.

Wait, are those...? Yeah, there's Sans and Asgore again, they're in the Lab proper. What are they even doing in there? Flowey sinks into the ground and starts heading to Hotland, but he keeps track of the pair as he goes. He feels the skeleton stop at Alphys' computer, then the lizard herself joins them and they take the elevator down? Huh. So she's finally going to suck it up and tell Asgore about it then?

Flowey reaches the underground corridor just as the door to the elevator opens.

He starts to follow the trio from behind the metal covering the walls. Alphys was evacuating people then. Clever. Explains why he had trouble finding monsters to kill sometimes. That must be why Snowdin Town and Ice Village were empty too. He should've paid more attention, he could've prevented that. Dammit, he's _really_ missing his ability to reset.

Flowey can't help but gag when he hears Alphys start to cry. He even peeks through a rusted gap in the metal and, sure enough, Asgore's hugging her like the sappy idiot he is. Flowey's almost tempted to do something about it, but he's not stupid enough to show hostility when both Sans and one of the amalgamates are present in the room. The skeleton's already bad enough without the total unpredictability of those goopy freaks.

Finally, something interesting starts to happen again. They get moving and take the other elevator to a place Flowey has almost no roots at all because he's hardly ever had to come here, even with the countless resets he's gone through.

What's this old office even doing here? It's almost directly under the castle and apparently used to belong to the trashbag and some guy named Gaster? Things just keep getting weirder today.

But then an idea comes to Flowey.

If he won't be able to reset anytime soon, and he has to play it safe, then wouldn't it be good to cozy up to the king? The guy's the leader of all monsterkind, if _he_ thinks Flowey can be useful then Flowey's gonna be protected from just about anything. Sans is there, but he shouldn't be a problem.

The flower steels himself and pushes through another gap, this one on the ceiling. At the last second, he reminds himself to not use his usual greeting.

"Hey there!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one turned out quite a bit longer than the other chapters for some reason, so I figured I'd end it here and continue from another character's POV. Hopefully that won't break up the scene too much.


	7. Verbal Gardening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FUCK I KNEW ID FORGOTTEN SOMETHING YESTERDAY I AM SO SORRY

Alphys is extremely thankful that Asgore isn't looking at her.

When the flower shows up, she can feel herself going pale. That's the flower she brought to life(?) with her Determination injections. The flower that Asgore doesn't know about. Oh god, what is he (it? them?) doing here?!

The lizard's eyes snap to the skeleton, but he hasn't budged an inch. The only change in him is that his eye lights have gone out, which isn't a good sign, but it doesn't look like he's going to do anything. Then Asgore speaks and Alphys' head whips back around.

"Howdy!" the king greets. "Are you alright, little one? You seemed very frightened last time we met. What is your name?"

Wait. Asgore has seen the flower before? But he doesn't know the thing's name, so... wow, okay, Alphys is just confused now. She glances at Sans again, briefly, but from what little she can see of his face in the low light he has his sockets fixated on the little animated plant, and isn't paying attention to anything else.

The flower tilts its disc with a little smile. "I'm Flowey, mister Dreemur! Flowey the flower! And gosh, I was just scared of the human! I was following them, they killed so many monsters, didn't they? I thought they were going to kill you too, so I tried to warn you!" The plant nods their disc in Sans' direction. Alphys could swear the skeleton tenses up, ever-so-slightly, under his numerous layers of clothing. "But then he showed up, and I was so afraid that I thought he was the human coming to get you! So I ran away!" A grin that almost splits the flower's disc in half stretches its mouth(?). "But now I found you again! And I can tell you exactly how many monsters they killed! That's what you're trying to find out, isn't it?"

Asgore's eyes widen visibly. He even glances at the other two monsters in surprise, but Alphys just averts her own gaze automatically. By the time she looks back, the king is staring at the flower again, thankfully. "Why, that is wonderful, Flowey! Please, do tell us! The matter of the funerals must be resolved as soon as possible."

Flowey's disc tilts. "Weeeeell, let me think." He presses a leaf to where his chin would be in thought. Alphys is all but certain he'd be counting on his fingers if he had them. "In the Ruins there were only... twenty three deaths. Then forty eight in Snowdin aaand... fifty six in Waterfall. Hotland and the Core had a lot more dust, I counted... one hundred and ninety two monsters killed there! Oh, and a lot of really powerful monsters died too! Papyrus tried to talk some sense into them, but they killed him in cold blood! Everyone in the Royal Guard is dead too, even Undyne! And Toriel got dusted when she tried to keep them in the Ruins!"

Alphys' jaw drops.

Oh no. The queen was in the Ruins? The one monster that Asgore wanted so badly to reunite with?

Her eyes go to the king. Asgore's own eyes are wide in shock, but they quickly squeeze shut as he gasps, then breathes in deep. He's holding back tears, Alphys just knows. She even steps close and puts a hand on his arm even though he can't feel it through the metal. "A-Asgore?"

The king shakes his head, but it's the flower who speaks up next. "Aw gosh, I'm sorry, mister Dreemur! Were you and Toriel close?" He's looking demure, but the expression feels slightly _off_ , somehow. Alphys can't really put her finger on why or how exactly.

Asgore sucks in another harsh breath. His eyes open halfway, but their corners are wrinkled and it's almost like his full age is suddenly visible on his bearded face, the endless years since the war weighing on him all at once with the loss of his better half. It's painful to see, but Alphys doesn't really know what to do, so she just stays there by his side, with her hand on his arm. He takes a few more deep breaths, forcibly gulps down what are probably sobs and tears trying to surface and, finally, straightens himself. There's this veiled strain behind his features now, behind the forced calmness he puts on.

"Yes," the king rumbles in that low, deep voice. "Toriel was my wife." It's almost a whisper, or as much one as Asgore can manage. His eyes go to Alphys, then his hand to hers so he can push it off his arm. He looks up at the flower. "Thank you, Flowey, for the information. Is there anything else you wish to tell us?"

The plant shakes its disc. "Nope, sorry. I just counted the deaths, I couldn't do anything else. I'm just a tiny flower, I didn't want to die!"

Asgore nods in understanding. "Of course. Thank you regardless, Flowey. We will make sure to put this information to good use."

The flower bounces on its stem and grins from one metaphorical ear to the other. "Great! That's all I wanted to hear, thanks!" And then he sinks into the ceiling and vanishes, a few specks of dirt slipping through the gap on the metal.

The king sighs and turns to Alphys. His eyes look... worryingly dead. "Do you have the numbers, Alphys?"

The lizard is almost tempted to say something, ask if he's okay, she even opens her mouth and everything. But she changes her mind and shuffles back over to the computer with a nod instead. "Y-yeah, I typed them here." She opened a simple text program while Flowey was been talking to write down the death count, and she highlights the text and turns the screen for Asgore to see.

His eyes scan the few lines of text quickly. Alphys isn't sure if she imagines it or not, but she feels like they pause very briefly on Toriel's name before moving away. "Good. We shall... have a burial ceremony for everyone who has fallen. Yes." The king goes quiet and nods to himself, thinking, his eyes blink slowly, then he hums under his breath. "But there are other matters to be dealt with." His gaze finds the lizard. "The last soul seems to have something wrong with it. I need to ask you to examine it and... repair it, I suppose."

Something wrong with the soul? That just sounds weird, but Alphys nods anyway. "Yeah, of course. W-what's wrong with it?"

It's Sans who answers, after staying silent throughout the whole interaction with the flower. His eye lights are back when she looks at him, casting a dim, almost eerie glow upon the edges of his face. "no idea. the thing was trying to pull itself apart when it came out, and now there's this big black line through it."

Alphys' own brow furrows. "O-oh. Yeah, t-that doesn't sound good."

The noise of Asgore's armor scraping against itself draws her eyes to him, but they whip back to Sans almost immediately when she realizes the king's gaze is on the skeleton now. Asgore's own eyes are still dead and empty. "Sans. I know you prefer to not get involved, but we must avoid a crisis. Would you be willing to help Alphys in this?"

There's a beat, but Sans merely shrugs. "sure. not like i've got anything better to do." His sockets are pointing vaguely forward, but Alphys can almost feel Papyrus' name all but burning on the screen next to her.

Asgore doesn't seem to pick up on it however, and nods to himself. "Thank you." He looks around, seemingly lost for a moment. He shakes his head. "I must make an official announcement. And... what about the soul?" The king's eyes go to Alphys again. Her hands automatically start fidgeting with her labcoat.

"W-well, it'd probably be b-best if we could move it here? A-all the equipment dealing with DT is here, a-and it's not that far from the C-capital. I can p-put together something to power the p-pod so we can study the soul. The only t-trouble is getting it here."

The skeleton chimes in again. "i know a shortcut for that." He doesn't even elaborate.

Alphys frowns and huffs under her breath. "F-fine. Then we can b-bring it here before t-the burial ceremony, and get to work a-after it?" Her eyes go back to Asgore.

The king nods. "Very well." He moves to get up, but realizes he still won't be able to stand fully and just settles back down. "I must make the announcement now. Do you have a microphone, Alphys?"

The lizard tugs on her sleeve uncomfortably. "N-no. I just configured the c-computer when I came here. I-I'll go grab one." Once Asgore gives her a silent nod, she moves over to the elevator, presses the button to make the door open, and steps inside. And then Alphys just lets her legs carry her while she thinks.

God, this whole thing is just a mess, isn't it? More than three hundred monsters killed by one single human. She's not sure if that's worth getting the seventh soul or not. The very concept of a monster being outright murdered is so alien to monsterkind as a whole it feels almost surreal. Monsters know nothing but compassion and kindness and so on. Thinking about all those dust piles waiting outside, in Snowdin and Waterfall and Hotland and even the Ruins... it's like a waking nightmare. It makes Alphys hug herself instinctively.

And Undyne... dammit, watching her fight was tantamount to torture. The way that the human had little to no reaction, even when they were beaten and bruised and had to heal instead of attacking so they wouldn't die. The way they dodged the Captain's attacks, not perfectly, but with such practiced ease that it was like they'd done it a million times already. Which, Alphys guesses they had? She's always having to remind herself about the whole timeline business.

Her claws tighten around her upper arms as the other elevator rumbles quietly around her. Her eyes squeeze shut. The image of Undyne melting into a heap flashes across her mind again. Undyne, the strongest monster Alphys knew after Asgore himself. The fabled Captain of the Royal Guard. She did what no other monster's ever experienced without outside influence. She generated her own Determination. And even that hadn't been enough to stop the human.

A choked sob manages to surface from the lizard, but she bites back the others that try to come after it and wipes at her eyes hurriedly. Alphys has shed enough tears already. She has work to do now, everyone's depending on her. Undyne wouldn't want her to sit around moping.

The elevator grinds to a halt. Alphys steps out, still hugging herself. The tapping of her claws on the floor is abnormally loud, even through the deep, droning, ever-present hum that always fills the lab. She reaches her desk and digs through the messy drawers until she finds the microphone; the thing's old and half-bent on its metal shell, but functional, and that's all that matters really. The Royal Scientist doubles back to the elevator, powers it past the wireless section, paces through the corridor and the gathered monsters, and goes back up to the old, formerly-abandoned office.

Asgore and Sans haven't moved an inch. It doesn't even look like they've spoken to each other while she was absent. Alphys gets behind the desk again, plugs in the microphone, and fiddles with a few programs on the screen to connect it to the network of speakers that spans the entirety of the underground. Once upon a time, before the Core began to convert the volcanic activity of Hotland into energy, they used to serve as warning sirens, but now they're just an easier way for Asgore to make his royal announcements.

"H-here you go," Alphys mumbles and hands the microphone over to the king. He takes a deep breath, and flips a little switch on the base.

"Dear citizens. I, King Asgore Dreemur, come to you with a heavy heart. We have much to celebrate in this fateful day, and much to grieve as well. We have acquired the last soul needed to open the barrier, but at the cost of three hundred and twenty nine monster lives. To those who have lost relatives, loved ones, friends, you have my utmost sympathy. I myself have lost someone very close to me today. Queen Toriel had exiled herself to the Ruins, and she was among the first to fall to the human."

A single, shining tear leaks out of the corner of Asgore's eye and rolls into his beard. He takes a moment to wipe at the trail of wet fur.

"This is a bittersweet victory. And, sadly, I am afraid that I cannot open the barrier yet. The seventh soul is unstable. It would be too dangerous to use it now. Our freedom, our future, are still out of reach. But, dear citizens, I beg of you to not lose hope. The Royal Scientist has already been recruited to work on the soul and stabilize it through any means necessary. She will work as swiftly as possible so that our hopes and dreams may come to fruition, and I promise you that, as soon as this issue is resolved, I will take the seven souls and open the barrier. So please, hold onto your hope, and together we shall make it through these trying times."

The king pauses. His eyes are vacant. When he sighs, he lets the air rush around the microphone so that everyone can hear it.

"Gather the dust. Choose a beloved item of the fallen. We shall have a ceremony the day after tomorrow, at 3 pm, to honor the dead and bury them as one in the Capital Square. For those who have not lost someone, I ask that you do everything in your power to aid and support those that have. I shall see you all at the ceremony. Goodbye."

Asgore flips the switch again and lowers the microphone. Alphys has to take it from his limp fingers to set it back on the desk. He reacts with a delay, glancing at the thing before getting to his feet even though he has to stay bent so he won't hit the ceiling. "This applies to you two as well," he tells Alphys and Sans.

Without another word, the king squeezes himself into the elevator, and the doors slide shut.


	8. Heartache

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one turned out a lot longer than all the others, but honestly? I'm kinda glad it did. I could try to cut it down to size, but it'd lose a lot of the impact I think, so I'm leaving it like this.
> 
> All I can say is, Asgore's having a bad time on this one.  
> Enjoy~

Asgore emerges into the boiling air of Hotland with a glacier where his heart should be.

It's a cold, dead weight in his chest that not even the heat of the magma can melt. His eyes burn when he looks around, but he can't give in yet. There are still things to do, families to console, dust to collect. And he should meet with an old friend.

The king sets off.

Wood creaks ominously underfoot as he crosses the bridge at the edge of Waterfall. He passes by the welcome sign, dark and lifeless. An archway of stone bounds over one of the many rivers that cut through the Underground. He comes out beneath Undyne's dramatic perch, steps over a tiny bridge, and halts at the start of the next.

Right there, almost exactly in the middle of the wooden pass, is one of the sights he was dreading.

Despite the extra spikes and heart motifs, the Captain's armor is unmistakeable, even through the strangely sticky dust gathered in and around it.

The ice in Asgore's chest splinters into shards that stab right through his lungs. His eyes burn again, and again he squeezes them shut and chokes down the tears and sobs that try to wrestle their way out of him.

By the time he looks again, there's another monster on the other end of the bridge. This sight actually manages to tug at the corner of the king's mouth, ever-so-slightly. Gerson is staring at him with a fond, sympathetic smile on that wrinkled old beak of his which Asgore can't help but reciprocate, however brief and faint. He's standing there, solid as ever, with his bad eye and bad leg and walking stick, and a burial jar tucked under one arm.

The turtle's smile fades when his eyes go down to the clogged armor between them. "That darned guppy never knew how to pick her fights," Gerson wheezes. His tone has only the faintest trace of reprimand under the sorrow and... regret, possibly? Asgore can't say for sure.

The two go silent.

Both of them were like fathers to Undyne, first Gerson and then Asgore himself.

Neither of them wants to be the first to approach her dust.

In the end, it's the turtle who breaks the stalemate. He sets his cane down carefully so he can hold the jar with both hands. He limps onto the bridge first, and Asgore follows suit shortly after. They meet in the middle, one on either side of the slashed armor, and kneel almost in unison despite Gerson's bad leg. One handful at a time, little by little, the two scoop Undyne's remains into the burial jar, making sure to use their claws on every little nook and corner of the armor to get as much of the dust as possible.

The texture and color of it isn't normal. Monster dust is supposed to be white and pearlescent and clings only to itself, but Undyne's has no sparkle, it's dull and feels wet to the touch and has this strange reddish tint to it when the light hits it at just the right angle. But despite it all, the pair of old monsters gathers every last speck they can find, and Gerson seals the jar once they're done.

Concealed by the white ceramic shell covered in runes, the dust doesn't feel quite as macabre, but the ache in Asgore's chest has only grown. He wants to thank Gerson, but his throat feels too tight to even breathe, let alone speak.

The turtle seems to understand. He doesn't wait for a response, but merely pats Asgore on the shoulder. The gesture turns into a tug when he uses the king's pauldron to help him stand.

Asgore's only reaction is a small nod. It's getting harder and harder to keep his tears locked away. He watches Gerson tuck the jar back under one arm, then hang the lashed-together armor pieces from the same hand and limp away down the bridge. The turtle picks up his walking stick, but stops and looks back at Asgore.

It's that look that spurs the king back into action. Gritting his teeth, he rises and starts to follow the turtle. It's hard to miss Gerson's little smirk of approval.

They walk in silence.

The field of Echo Flowers is equally silent, and abnormally dark without the fireflies that are so ubiquitous to this particular area as they tread through lukewarm water. The trails of luminescent grass guide them through the thin, treacherous soil; it's Asgore who fires up the lamps they pass by since Gerson has his hands full. Faintly, they can hear noises coming from Temmie Village.

They walk through more Echo Flowers, these ones accompanied by ephemeral sparkles in the air, and tread more water, feeling the silt rush past their toes in the cool current of the twin waterfalls. And at long last, they come to Gerson's home and improvised shop.

A single cavernous space, divided into two sections by thin wooden panels. There's the shop area, with a counter and the Delta Rune on the wall behind it matching the golden one on Asgore's chest. Then there's Gerson's living space proper, one side dedicated to kitchen appliances, the other to the turtle's private area. There are shelves almost overflowing with books and antique curiosities, a dresser bearing various board games on top, a nightstand with an old ornate lamp, a sleeping nest made out of a whole cluster of pillows, a desk holding an extremely old computer, and a few cushy armchairs. It is quite cozy, all things considered.

Undyne's jar finds its way onto a corner of the mostly empty desk.

Asgore looks around with a stab of nostalgia. If only he were coming here to drink tea and play chess with the old turtle. "Gerson," he calls hesitatingly. "The Royal Guard needs a Captain. Can I ask you to look over the most promising candidates and choose one?"

The turtle's hand is still on the jar; it slides off with an awful claws-on-ceramic noise. Gerson nods, a weak smile on his beak. "Sure. I'll give those young'uns a once over. That'll be after the fancy ceremony, right?"

That catches the king off-guard. He hadn't actually thought that far ahead, but he's glad for the help. It even gives him an idea. "Yes. I will make an official statement then. The Royal Guard will be gathered at the ceremony, it will be easier."

He nods to himself, but deep down, Asgore wishes he didn't have to replace Undyne so quickly. She was one of the best Captains he'd ever laid eyes on, with the possible exception of Gerson himself. A bit hot-headed, yes, and a little too intense and impulsive sometimes, but she knew damn well how to rally a bunch of monsters for a single worthy cause, and her training program was easily the most efficient to whip new recruits into shape.

Gerson, no doubt considering something similar, merely limps over to his favorite armchair and sinks into it. His smile is gone. He picks up a random book off the nearby shelf and stares at the cover without flipping it open.

 

The silence stretches on.

 

Eventually, another thought occurs to Asgore. "I also want you to gather a group of woshua and... whoever else is willing to help. The Golden Hall needs to be cleaned and repaired."

The turtle nods wordlessly. His one good eye scans the cover of the book, but then he just shakes his head and sets it back down on a little side table. When his gaze finds the king again, it's full of sympathy. "You're heading out to the Ruins, then?"

Suddenly it's like an iron hand sinks its claws into Asgore's heart. He can only nod in response, barely breathing.

"Sure you don't want company?"

Another silent nod.

Gerson sighs, picks up the book again, and opens a random page. "I'll see you at the ceremony then."

A third nod, and Asgore turns on his heel and moves to the exit; his hand is on the doorframe when the turtle's voice reaches his ears again.

"...you take care, Fluffybuns."

There's an audible scraping of claws on metal when the king clutches at his chest. He hurries out, without a word, walking almost blindly down a side passage and to the edge of the river. To his immense relief, the boat is there waiting. Asgore climbs in and his knees just give out, he falls sitting at the far end of the boat and buries his face in his hands.

The cloaked monster just stands impassive, as usual. "Tra la la~ Where would you like to go~?"

"S-snowdin," Asgore manages to eke out.

He feels the boat start moving and the cool air begin to flow by, the quiet whisper of water lapping at the sides of the vessel, but it's all just white noise to him.

He _can't_ cry, not yet. Now more than ever, Asgore needs to be the strong leader of monsterkind, he needs to inspire hope for a brighter future, a chance at freedom, the freedom they've been waiting and wanting for so long, a freedom that is finally within their grasp. He is the King, and the King does not blubber like a child out in plain sight. The King rules with a sure hand and a kind heart, not with tears.

Chill wind dances under the king's ears and sends a shiver down his spine. They're entering Snowdin, which means they'll be making port soon.

Asgore takes a few deep breaths. The icy air helps quell the flames of his magic, thankfully, and his breath comes out in thick clouds of steam. He wipes away the moisture in his eyes, then straightens his back and pulls himself to his feet. The mist clings to his armor as condensation, then freezes and turns into fragile glitter upon the metal when the boat comes to a halt.

"Tra la la~ Here we are~" goes the hooded figure.

"Thank you," Asgore says before carefully stepping out onto the snow-covered earth.

His paw pads immediately protest against the freezing cold, but he doesn't care. If anything, it helps him stay grounded and level-headed as he paces through the empty town. The residents aren't back yet. He was the first one to leave the Laboratory, so that's expected, and less nerve-wracking if he's being honest with himself. There are less eyes to keep up appearances to.

Asgore walks in silence.

He crosses the stone bridge painted to look like wood by a certain skeleton. He passes by the dust-clogged armor of Greater Dog, and weaves around the little snow igloos the former guard used to sleep in sometimes. Each pile of dust he passes, Asgore averts his eyes from. There's already something bad enough waiting for him at the end of the line, he doesn't want to have to think about even more death before he gets there.

A narrow, slippery pass covered in ice leads to a frozen field dotted with buttons, which he ignores. Lesser Dog's sentry stations stands empty, as well as headless snow dog in front of it, leaning precariously to one side. The grey tiles of Alphys' puzzle are already getting covered in snow when Asgore traverses them. The rows of spikes beyond are deactivated, not that it would have been a problem if it weren't; he's big enough to step over the things.

The king walks between the remains of his old nose nuzzle rivals, Dogamy and Dogaressa. Their matching black cloaks and axes are almost on top of one another, and their dust is connected by a thin trail of pearlescent white. He moves on. He pays no attention to the plate of frozen spaghetti, or to the word search page left on the snow. The king ignores the ball game, and walks around a second field of ice with a sign in the middle, but he stops at the gap in the trees.

The snowman that stands at the edge of the cliff has been reduced to a pile of formless snow, but... he can just reform himself, can't he? He'll be okay, in time.

It lifts Asgore's spirits, just a little bit, to know that.

But he continues on his journey. He's close now, isn't he?

Doggo's station is caked in dust, one dagger resting atop the counter, the other sitting in the sparkling snow. Papyrus' makeshift stand is the same as ever, with its frozen cardboard walls and the sign taped to the front. The king walks around the remains of an icedrake, past one of the old mailboxes, in front of one of Sans' many posts, and through the narrow corridor of trees that leads to the great double doors of the Ruins.

The purple rock feels almost ominous as it draws close. The door has been left slightly ajar, Asgore can tell by the disturbed snow at its feet. His breath catches in his throat as he pulls the heavy door open, pushing each half far enough to touch the wall on either side. He doubts this door's been wide open like this since monsterkind first left the Ruins.

The corridor beyond is dark, only a single spot of light landing on a tiny little patch of grass amidst the blackness. He holds out a hand, summons a small flame over his palm to light the way, and steps forward.

The air is deathly still. The only sounds are his own.

His hesitant breath.

His heartbeat in his ears.

His armor scraping and tugging on itself.

His claws clicking against the stone with his every step.

His fire flickering as he moves.

Asgore sees it before he's even halfway through the corridor. The other door has been left wide open, and through it is the mound of white upon the floor, the indigo dress that Toriel used to love so much now empty and torn, caked in dust, _her_ dust.

The flame over his palm sputters and fizzles out as his hand falls limply to his side. His steps become automatic, almost zombie-like. His attention is wholly on the sparkling pile of white, and now, at long last, the tears begin to flow freely, dribbling down the sides of his muzzle only to get lost in his beard.

Toriel... not Toriel... Asgore already knew, but... the sight is so much worse.

The icy weight in his chest vanishes and becomes a gaping hole instead, a ragged, bleeding wound as vast and empty as the void itself.

The king steps over the dust in silence. He needs a burial jar before anything else.

The tears continue to soak Asgore's beard as he paces through the long basement and emerges into his old home. His mouth forms a permanent tortured frown as he walks through the old rooms and soaks in the familiar heat, the inviting colors everywhere, the old, worn books, the armchair, the fireplace that no longer has any fire to give.

The kitchen yields no results. Why would the jar even be here? He was stupid to think it would. The smell of butterscotch and cinnamon filling the room, the white fur stuck in the sink drain, they only intensify his tears, but he turns around and walks out. His chin is starting to feel wet.

He opens the door that, once upon a time, led to his son's room. The second bed is missing, and the other seems to have been recently used.

Asgore feels something, like a spark in his chest.

The jar isn't there.

Toriel's room is filled with her scent, and the only pot of golden flowers in the entire house, it seems. She wouldn't keep the jar where she sleeps. No one does.

The spark becomes a little flickering candle flame.

His old room, like Toriel's in his own home, is 'under renovations', but he pushes inside anyway. His bed, and the one missing from the kid's room, are both here, propped up against the wall. The air is musty with disuse. His old wardrobe hangs open, overflowing with junk items, things that were put away to be dealt with later and then forgotten, cleaning supplies and other assorted stuffs.

The telltale gleam of white ceramic is visible behind a cracked photo frame. Asgore picks up the latter and finds a downright ancient picture of him, Toriel and Asriel, together on a picnic in Waterfall. This was before Chara became a part of their family. They'd always been closer to Toriel for some reason.

A teardrop hits his breastplate. Under the metal, the candle flame is growing into a fireball. Heat is starting to emanate from the king, but the tears never stop flowing, through his beard and now onto his chest from the soaked patch on his chin.

He puts the frame aside and grabs the urn, then wheels around and retraces his steps back to the basement and to Toriel's dust. He kneels and scoops it into the jar, little by little, just like with Undyne. He gathers every last bit that he can that isn't clinging to the fabric of her dress, seals the jar and, for good measure, folds the dress in on itself and ties the sleeves around the neck of the urn.

And then he sinks to the floor. His back hits the wall as he drags the jar into his lap and clutches it to his chest, but his pauldrons start getting in the way when his shoulders convulse with sobs, goddammit, why does he even wear these things?!

Asgore throws the golden pieces aside, symbol and all; they clatter loudly against the stone and hit the opposite wall. His arm guards join the pauldrons shortly after, and then his breastplate itself is added to the pile with a noise like a gong.

Asgore is left with only the bottom half of his armor, and the thick black fabric covering his arms and torso, when he finally curls in around the burial jar, clutches it to his chest, and just lets go completely. Wisps of fire come to life all around him as the flame in his chest expands and fills his entire being, they orbit lightning-fast as he howls his loss and rage at the ceiling, the purple stone itself ignites around him and turns black with soot and cocoons him in fire, spasming and pulsing with every heavy sob that rocks his frame.

That kid, that damned _child_ , they did this! They killed her, _everyone_ , threw his kingdom into disarray, and still had the audacity to accept her kindness, sleep in his son's bed, eat her food before striking her down like an _animal!!!_

 **He's going to hunt every single human on the face of the Earth AND BURN EVERYTHING TO THE GODDAMN** **_GROUND!!!!!_ **


	9. Drunken Exposition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter involves alcohol. I know some folks don't like that, so, y'know, just a warning. It's nothing major, basically just an excuse to get Sans to actually explain stuff, but tread carefully if you're sensitive about that.
> 
> Also it's about as long as the previous chapter for some reason! This might turn into the new standard length for chapters, who knows. I sure don't.
> 
> AND!!! Important announcement! I'm changing up the order of the first four chapters to put them in chronological order, and giving new titles to all the chapters that've been posted so far.

Alphys is pushing bits of chicken around her noodles with the chopsticks.

It hasn't been a great day. Not quite as bad as she'd imagined, but still pretty damn bad. Monsters are dead, _Undyne's_ dead, and she's just spent the past few hours going around the Underground all over again helping some of the amalgamates gather the dust of their relatives. They can't touch it or they'll just absorb it into their bodies. Endogeny did it by accident when the bunny family was accompanying them back through Snowdin. So Alphys had the absolutely _wonderful_ job of leading the amalgamates around with a literal cart full of burial urns to collect all the dust.

If that isn't the most morbid thing she'll ever do in her life, Alphys has no idea what might be.

Not all the amalgamates were with her, thankfully. The bunny family decided to help Endogeny with the dust of the Canine Unit, and that one tall, lanky one hasn't show its... well, lack of a face, since Alphys was down in the old labs handing out chisps. Snowy's mother, containing the deceased father of the bunny family, was also helped by them. In the end, Alphys only had to escort Lemon Bread and Reaper Bird through Waterfall and Hotland respectively.

They'd been joined by Napstablook in Waterfall. Ghosts don't even leave any dust behind when they die, so once the amalgamates had been dealt with Alphys had resorted to gathering the broken parts of Mettaton's robotic body instead and handing them to Napstablook in a container they could drag behind them.

The Royal Scientist looks around morosely.

She's sitting in her unfolded bed, already in the most comfy pyjamas she could dig out of the messy drawer; a matching ensemble of pants and a long-sleeved button-up, both of which patterned with a purple-and-black plaid and both way too big for her, but she couldn't care less. Alphys has a beat-up old laptop open in front of her, but she hasn't started a new episode since the last one ended a few minutes ago. It's not Mew Mew, it's some other, less saccharine anime, but she's just not in the mood.

Alphys' gaze lands on her fish-pattern lamp, then on the pile of unopened letters that she still hasn't done anything about. There's no point in keeping them anymore, now that everyone knows what happened. And it's not like she's doing anything right now anyway.

The lizard sighs.

She puts the now cold cup of noodles down on the nightstand; well, she calls it a nightstand, but it's just a part of her fold-up bed that forms a usable surface when it's open. Alphys slides off the mattress, sandwiches the letters between her claws, and ambles over to the downward escalator to dump it all in the garbage can, which she does unceremoniously. She even stops by her desk and puts a new sticky note on her computer saying 'EMPTY TRASH'.

And then she yelps when there's suddenly a weird clatter behind her and she wheels around with her claws sparking by reflex in the low light.

"Augh! Sans, I told you to s-! ...um. S-Sans?"

Alphys has to lower her gaze. The skeleton _is_ there, but he's sprawled out on the floor like he tripped on the way in (even though he didn't use the door, she would've heard him if he had). He's moving and all, working his limbs to start getting back on his feet, but his movement's way too slow even for him. Then the smell hits her, and Alphys can't help but cringe.

Yep, there's a fallen bottle of _something_ over there by the wall, god, what the hell _is_ that?! Rubbing alcohol or something? Just the fumes are making her nose burn. Which, mixed with the smell of ketchup, does not make for a pleasant aroma. If it were any other monster, they'd probably be gagging and possibly going further than that.

...well, except Papyrus.

Hmm.

"Sans?" she calls again, but he's still too busy steadying himself on the far wall to listen.

The'yre almost in complete darkness, only the lights in her room are on, but his sockets are glowing a lot more than usual, flashing between cyan and yellow. She can see when he bends down, catches the bottle in his fingers, gulps down what little is left, then ambles unsteadily over to the garbage can and drops it inside. When the skeleton turns toward her, Alphys realizes the light's coming from only one socket, his left one; the right is blank?

Sans plants one hand on her desk, and points the other at the lizard like he's accusing her of something. "i need t'tell ya stuff," he slurs, then pauses. Alphys can almost hear the metaphorical clockwork turning in his skull. "i need some paper," he adds after a moment.

The lizard has to catch Sans when he tries to move around her, oversteers, and nearly falls again. "Whoa, h-hey, easy! Sans, you're drunk!" Thank god skeletons are light. The two of them are about the same height, but Alphys can easily pull one of his arms over her shoulders even as he tries feebly to protest.

"no fuggen shit," he warbles back. The shadow of his hand while he waves it around at random is moving back and forth along the wall like a ghost. His socket is glowing a _lot_. "award fer 'most fuggen obvious observation ever' righ' there."

Alphys frowns. She knows better than to try to argue with a drunk monster, though. "I have a notebook a-and some pens upstairs. Let's just go there, o-okay? Then you can... s-sit in my bed so you don't k-kill yourself."

She starts towing him, guiding herself mostly by his light, and Sans just lets himself be dragged. His skull comes to rest on her shoulder, and she can hear his toe bones scraping on the tiles. Where are his slippers? In fact, the skeleton's arm is bare under her claws now that she's thinking about it, she's holding onto bone directly! Sans always looks like he's covered in at least like, seven billion layers of clothing, but right now it seems more like a single plain T-shirt judging by the rib outlines that're bumping against her side with every step.

Oh god, please tell her he's not naked or something?! Nudity isn't really a big deal to monsters, and skeletons don't even _have_ anything to show/hide, but that is _not_ something Alphys wants to deal with, least of all after all the shit she's been through today.

They go up the other escalator and back into proper lighting conditions, and Alphys risks a glance.

Okay, he's not. Sans has his usual shorts on and, yeah, a white shirt stained with something she guesses is ketchup if the color's anything to go by, but he's barefoot. It looks like the pillows he keeps wrapped around his lumbar spine are there too, though they seem a bit too loose. Might just be the lack of other layers over them. Maybe he was just at home and decided to come to the Lab? His one socket is still lit, and now she notices the cyan is a bit more prominent than the yellow for some reason.

They get to her bed. Alphys has to hurry to get the laptop out of the way before the skeleton just kind of flops onto the mattress. He lays there for a moment, mumbling into the bedsheets, then pulls himself into a cross-legged sitting position at the foot of the bed and stays there, swaying slightly.

The lizard, meanwhile, goes to find the notebook and pens, after making sure her laptop is safely out of the way inside her wardrobe. "Why do you want to t-tell me stuff now?" she asks while she's searching. "You never tell me anything. ...uh, _willingly_ , I-I mean."

Sans grumbles under his breath. "i only say stuff people _need_ t'know. an' y'need t'know this if we're gonna be workin' on the kid's soul."

That gets the lizard's attention. Something to do with the seventh soul?

Alphys clutches a notebook covered in sparkles to her chest, and a bundle of gel pens in one hand, as she shuffles back over to her bed and climbs onto the half that Sans isn't occupying. "Okay..." She hands over the items. "W-what is it?"

The skeleton drags the book close in silence. He flips to a random blank page, prods the pens around in thought, and picks up the dark green one. He stares at the page for a moment, lost in thought. Then...

"time's like a tree."

Alphys' brow immediately furrows in confusion. What?

" 'cept you gotta replace 'grow' with 'flow'," Sans is saying. He's scrawling out glittery green lines on the paper now, a central one followed by several smaller offshoots that then branch off themselves. His hand-to-eye coordination is less than ideal at the moment, so the lines are all rather sinuous.

"time flows and branches into multiple timelines whenever anyone makes a decision, or when probability comes into play." He extends some of the lines to loop back around to the main spine or to another offshoot. "the branches often just come back together eventually if the decision or whatever it was that split them don't matter in the long run, or sometimes if the conditions in each timeline somehow end up matching enough fer them t'converge."

Alphys twists her head to try and look at the skeleton's little diagram the right way. She remembers seeing something related to this in the same files she got the blueprints for the DT Extractor from. Stuff talking about multiple timelines, but there was so much scientific terminology she wasn't familiar with, and it all sounded so theoretical that she never really dug too deep into it.

The DT Extractor itself was more important at the time anyway.

Sans picks up the notebook, holds it up to her, and shakes it angrily. "imagine this, times _infinity_ . that's how many fuggen timelines there are at any given point. it's fuggen _bullshit_." He drops the book and flips it to face him again.

Alphys thought this was going to be about the seventh soul? She stays quiet though, it feels like Sans is going somewhere.

The green pen is replaced with a red one between the skeleton's fingers.

"now, humans have determination, righ'? s'like, their whole thing. and if ya got enough of it, ya can do a reset." Sans scribbles a large red spot near the end of one of the green branches.

"resettin' here basically means prunin'." He slashes a long red line through the red dot, then covers what little is left of the green branch beyond the slash with random scrawls.

"a reset ends a timeline artificially, kinda kills it if ya wanna look at it that way. that timeline's gone, th' people in it are gone, everything gone. but you, th' person who does the reset, go back t' an earlier point with all yer memories from th' dead timeline." He draws a long, curved arrow from the red spot back down to the nearest branching point of the green lines, and makes another roundish scrawl there.

"well, s'more like yer memories go back, th' 'you' in that timeline's gone too, but tha's b'side th' point. what matters here is this fuggen thing righ' here." Sans jabs angrily at the lower red spot with the pen. "if ya can reset, it basically means ya know the future. an' that lets ya fuggen... _fuck_ **_ev'r'thin' UP!_ ** "

Sans suddenly starts to scribble all over the page with the red pen, so hard he actually rips the paper and then swipes everything right off the mattress and makes Alphys flinch back by reflex. The pens clatter noisily, the notebook bounces, the torn page flutters and settles all the way at the bottom of the opposite wall, and the red pen itself flies so far it actually hits said wall and leaves a little red line on it before reaching the floor. Sans' lit socket is glowing even brighter now, so much it's actually giving off wisps of cyan when he starts _shouting_.

"I ALREADY HAD ENOUGH PROBLEMS WITHOUT THAT FUGGEN KID MAKIN' A MESS'A TH' TIMELINES!!! TIME FUGGEN SPLITTIN' EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN TIME **ANYTHIN'** FUGGEN HAPPENS DOWN'ERE, AN' THEY THINK THEY CAN JUS' FUGGEN WALTZ IN AN' START NIPPIN' TIMELINES LEFT AN' RIGHT LIKE THEY OWN THE GODDAMN PLACE!!! **THAT'S NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED T'BE!!** "

The skeleton's spine suddenly curls in, his fingers claw at his skull. "y'can't jus'... play with time like that..." he mumbles, voice now lower than even his usual tone, which is already pretty close to a whisper.

Alphys hasn't moved from the flinch at all. It's only now that she starts to relax again. Her eyes sweep over the scattered pens on the floor, the notebook, the torn page, and come back to Sans.

She's speechless.

Alphys has never, _ever_ , seen such an outburst from the skeleton. Hell, she's hardly ever seen him raise his voice above a slightly-louder-than-normal tone. Even back when he still came into the Lab to work on whatever it was he used to do, he never looked stressed, or angry, or anything but comfortably laid-back. It almost feels... _wrong_ , somehow. Like someone's replaced the Sans she knows with some other short skeleton monster that looks the same.

Or, more accurately, like Sans dropped his aloof act thanks to the alcohol.

"U-um..." The Royal Scientist's hand reaches forward, tentatively, but pulls back. Sans has his head in his hands now, so he doesn't see it.

What should Alphys say?! God, this so weird. She's not Papyrus, she doesn't know how to... make people feel good about themselves. She's not even completely comfortable in her own skin! Her eyes scan the area again, desperate for some form of inspiration. They land on the torn page. "S-so, uh... the human c-could... um... _reset_ to a-anywhere?"

There's a delay. Alphys even wonders if Sans fell asleep.

"no," the skeleton mumbles eventually.

He lifts his head and looks around as well, but when he starts moving to get up again, wanting to grab the pens and notebook, the lizard hurries to shoo him back down. "No, stay! You're n-not steady!" Alphys herself gets to her feet. It was already a wonder Sans didn't crack his skull open on the floor tiles earlier, she can't afford to have him falling again and having his head fall off or something. "I-I'll get them. You just... s-stay there, okay?"

The skeleton grumbles something unintelligible under his breath, but complies.

After a few moments, Alphys rejoins him atop the mattress and hands him back the writing materials. "T-there." Sans doesn't thank her (of course) and instead just flips back to the bit of the page he drew on that's still in the book. It's the top half, so the area he needs, with the red lines, is still there.

Sans grabs a golden pen.

"ya can only reset to a point where there's a disturbance in th' fabric o' reality." He draws a little asterisk next to the lower red spot. "that's called a save point."

The skeleton flips to an unsullied page. "these disturbances're normal, they're like subatomic particles. always poppin' in and outta existence in a matter of less than nanoseconds. and they're kinda like this."

Sans starts dashing out several straightish, golden lines across the page, forming a diagonal square grid so they won't overlap with the lines already printed. "space," he says as he taps one of the junctions. The golden pen is then replaced with the green one from earlier, and Sans adds another grid on top of the first. "time." He taps a dark green junction. Finally, with a dark blue pen, he adds a third set of crossing lines, forming something that looks almost like a plaid pattern with green, yellow and blue. "magic." He taps a third, newly-added junction.

This time it's Alphys who speaks up. "That's the chaotic factor." It's a guess, but this sounds an awful lot like basic quantum theory. This is stuff she used to study before she even became the Royal Scientist. "It creates instability b-between space and time."

To her satisfaction, the skeleton nods. "yep. triggered the big bang an' all, ya already know this part." Still with the dark blue pen, he scrawls a messy cluster of looping lines near the center of the paper. "anyway, sometimes that instability's strong enough t'make these disturbances." Sans taps the mess of blue with the pen, then drops it and grabs the red one again.

"what determination does is... it sorta takes hold o' these knots an'... stabilizes'em." He envelops the blue scribble in a red circle, looping around it several times. "makes a weak point in the fabric. s'not a conscious thing, it just happens if there's enough determination around. an' if someone's got enough DT, they can..." The skeleton lifts the page, and spears the pen through it, right in the center of blue circled with red. "...get b'tween th' threads an' kinda brush up against th' void."

Alphys' eyes suddenly widen. "Oh! That was in the files! I c-couldn't understand it back then..." She frowns. "S-so, this 'void' place, it... e-exists _outside_ of reality?"

Sans nods again. "yep. jus' like how there's an outside t' th' underground, an' an outside t' th' earth, an' an outside t' th' milky way an' so on. th' void's outside ev'r'thin' we recognize as 'reality', beyond th' fabric o' space, time an' magic." He pulls the pen out and flips back to the torn page, with the branching green and the red scribbles.

"but it don't really matter righ' now. ya don't go into th' void when ya reset, it just serves as... a path fer yer memories t' get sent back t'yer save point through yer determination." Sans tears the remainder of the paper out, folds it with the lines facing outward in such a way that the two red spots are back to back, and stabs the pen through them so it comes out of the one at the end of the arrow.

" _this_ ," he shakes the paper like a flag, "is what the kid was doin'."

Alphys stares at it. It does make sense, what Sans just explained, in a weird sort of way. Her throat knots up when she tries to think back to Undyne's battle, but... the human _had_ felt strangely... knowing?... of what'd happen next. Alphys fiddles with a button on her pyjamas. But then... hmm, no, she doubts Sans would tell her how he even managed to defeat the human if they could do all this, he probably just has something up his sleeve that'd he'd refuse to tell her as usual. Still, she can't help but wonder...

"H-how do you know all this?"

Before answering, Sans calmly tugs the paper off the pen, tears the other page he drew on off the notebook, and crumples everything into a ball. "that don't matter," he says. The light from his socket is starting to dim.

What?! Alphys is about to shout when she stops herself. She even opens her mouth, but then her jaws close again and she sinks back, grumbling under her breath. " _Fine._ " She's so busy looking away sulkily she doesn't realize Sans is getting off the mattress until he's teetering off balance, shit!

She jumps to catch him, but then he just... disappears? What the hell?! It's like he just... sunk into the floor or something!

Augh! Alphys has to claw at her forehead, goddammit, she hates when he does this!!! This stupid skeleton's going to give her a heart attack some day. The only reason she even knows he's about as sturdy as wet paper is because Sans literally broke his arm once by accident, back when he still came to the Lab, while she'd been in the room, and then he'd had no way of refusing a full-body exam that, yep, had confirmed his practically negative health.

The lizard glares at the spot the skeleton vanished into. She could swear she saw some weird colors right underneath him just before he was gone, but it all went by so fast, she has no idea what just happened. One moment he was there, about to land flat on his face yet again, and the other there was just the same floor tiles as ever and no trace of the skeleton's presence other than the crumpled paper.

Alphys huffs under her breath as she gathers the gel pens and the notebook again. She puts those away, uses the paper ball to get the red line off the wall, and makes a loop downstairs again to throw it away before she finally turns the lights off in her room and curls up under the bedsheets to sleep.

She can only hope Sans will be less of an evasive jerk tomorrow. They _are_ supposed to move the seventh soul down to the old labs together, after all.


	10. Soul Transport

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sure seem to be forgetting to post these chapters at the right time a lot lately, aren't I? And this the last one I had in my buffer so, if the next one doesn't come come at the right time then I apologize in advance.

Sans is swirling coffee around his mug, watching the steam drift lazily upward.

The skeleton has a massive headache and can't even muster the will to maintain his eye lights, so his sockets are nothing but dark empty pits. He should _not_ have drank that much last night. Why did Grillby even agree to give him something that was pretty much 90% alcohol anyway? Isn't the guy supposed to _keep_ him from getting shitfaced? That's what bartenders exist for. That, and listening to the customer's problems going 'mhm' and 'yeah' and 'really?'.

Sans grumbles wordlessly under his breath. He knows other Sans-es turned to alcohol to cope with the Reports. Well, 'cope' may be too generous of a word. He's seen them in glimpses. They're not many, at least, but it's their effect on their own versions of Papyrus that always kept this particular Sans away from the stuff. But now Papyrus isn't around anymore to tell him what to do.

The skeleton melts forward until he's draped over the table, chin resting on the wood. He has no more reason to stick around, really. Gaster's been gone for years, and now he's lost both Toriel and Papyrus almost at the same time. He was never terribly close friends with Undyne, but she's gone too either way. There's only Asgore left and... Alphys too, he supposes? She's more of a business partner than a friend, though. It'd be so easy to just... lie down and not move anymore until he turns to dust. Let himself fall. Not like it'd make a difference, anyway, another Sans would choose to not do that.

 

...

 

 _Siiiiiiiigh_.

Might as well actually _be_ that Sans. If nothing else, he might be able to offer some insight into the kid for some other Sans to use, one who isn't in such a shitty fucking timeline. And Asgore will get upset if he dies.

The skeleton (mostly) straightens himself. He gulps down the coffee in one go and drops the mug in the sink through a small shortcut. It's early afternoon, but he only just woke up a few minutes ago. He gets to his feet. Sans is still wearing the same stained shirt and shorts from last night, when he'd drunkenly shown up at Alphys' place to talk her ear off. He uses another shortcut to get to his room, and lets his mind wander while he gets dressed.

What was he even _thinking?_ She didn't _really_ need to know all that. He'd practically explained to her everything Gaster ever found out about souls and resets and Determination over literal _decades_ of research. That's what he gets for getting drunk. Sans vows to never touch the stuff ever again. If the previous night is anything to go by, he'd probably just end up killing himself by accident by tripping on something. His forehead still has a tiny crack on it and everything, it's not fully healed yet. It's too small to see, but he can feel the soreness of the bone in that spot, which does no favors to his migraine. His fingers even ghost over the area vaguely.

Sans looks down at himself. Slippers, check. Shorts, check. Blue hoodie on top of everything, check. Pillows bracing his lumbar, check. He makes sure to pull the belt that holds them around his spine tight, spares only a momentary glance to the dust-caked armor and the burial urn in the corner, and takes a shortcut to Hotland.

Ugh, god, the heat just makes his skull pound harder. He should've come out inside the Lab already. Sans hurries over to the front door and slips inside before the pain gets too much, thanking the cool temperature that's always maintained between the sterile walls.

Alphys is there at her desk, staring at him with concern. "Sans? Are you alright?"

It's only now that the skeleton realizes he's missing both his customary grin and his eye lights today, but honestly he couldn't give less of a fuck at this point. It's already a wonder he's still out and about, he's not going to wear his mask on top of that. Sans dodges the issue with a shrug as he steps behind the seated lizard.

She's managing the power distribution again, with a particular focus on the basement of the royal castle where the soul pods are. "what are we doing today?" he asks, but his sockets are on the energy uptake of the Stasis Generator that fuels the soul pods.

Alphys turns to look at the readouts too. "W-well, we decided with A-Asgore yesterday that we were going to m-move the seventh soul here to study it. Uh, a-after the ceremony, I-I mean. S-so I'm c-calculating how much power it takes to keep o-one of the soul pods running b-by itself. W-we should be able to k-keep it plugged into the o-other Stasis Generator, i-if it's still working."

Sans' sockets scan the rows of numbers, the status reports, the energy output levels of the Core. They wouldn't need that much energy to keep the pod stable in the smaller secondary Generator, at least not compared to what the main one requires, and it looks like Alphys already returned the power levels in the old labs to normal, so there should be no problem. If the thing still works, that is.

"sounds good," he says simply.

The lizard fidgets with her labcoat, and slides off the seat. "L-let's go check on it, then." She moves to start leading them to the elevator, but a bony hand on her arm stops her.

Welp, time to show her even more stuff, Sans thinks to himself. If she was angry last night at him not saying how he knows so much about Determination and everything, then... well, Sans isn't going to go out of his way to explain every little detail about his shortcuts, let's just leave it at that. He just wants to be done and over with it as soon as possible, and to be honest doing what they want to do would just take forever without a shortcut or two.

"we'll take a shortcut," he tells her. Before Alphys can start arguing, the skeleton holds out his free hand. A black crack splits the air next to them, widens to fit them both comfortably, and aligns with the old labs far below. With the hand still on her arm, Sans pulls Alphys through, fingers sliding down the limb to hold her wrist instead. He lets go, closes the shortcut, and waits for the explosion.

At first, Alphys can only stare at the spot where the crack was. Her jaw's dropped. It moves up and down a few times. Her hands gesture vaguely through the air, as though tracing the contours of the opening.

Then she whips around and practically screeches. "What the hell _was_ that?! This is how you get around so quick?! Sans, why didn't you tell me?! How can you even _do_ that?! It shouldn't be possible!"

The skeleton just winces. Why with the _screaming?_ "don't shout," he mumbles simply.

The lizard makes a noise somewhere between a groan and a yell as her hands fly to her forehead for lack of hair to claw at. "You are impossible! I'll never understand how Papyrus could _tolerate_ you!"

Sans suddenly feels his bones turn to ice. It's almost a miracle that he manages to suppress the glow from his socket, but his eye lights still materialize, staring at Alphys with an intensity that makes her shrink back. She seems to almost deflate, even if there's still some petulance left in her eyes when she turns away and huffs under her breath. "S-sorry," she mutters reluctantly.

 

A heavy silence hangs between them.

 

After a while, Alphys looks around. They're a few levels above the area where the amalgamates were, in a large, rectangular room. Broken-down machinery lines the walls, the tubing ragged and hanging like torn arteries, the displays black and dead, the metallic shells chewed open by rust like carcasses. Despite the state of disrepair of pretty much everything in the room, however, a few light bulbs flicker weakly overhead. There was a period where Alphys spent a lot of time here trying to make sense of all these broken machines, so she'd had to repair the lighting at least a little bit.

At the far end of the room, opposite to the only doorway leading in and out, is the secondary Stasis Generator. The lizard shuffles over to it and, without a word, the skeleton follows, claws and slippers pattering abnormally loud against the floor. Little clouds of (regular) dust are kicked up with their every step.

Relative to the rest of the stuff all around them, the Secondary Generator is rather small. The main body of it only comes up to about Alphys' chest. Its shape is like an elongated cube, with the wide side facing them. A screen and keyboard jut out the side at an angle, and the top of the device is divided into three circular slots meant for holding one soul pod each. Thick wires sit exposed on either end and below the screen, with one braid of them trailing away and into a special wall socket over to the right.

Sans just stays back and watches. He's meant to help Alphys, after all, not take charge.

The lizard probes a hand under the screen to poke the power button hidden there. A mechanical whine rings out, followed by a light like a guttering candle that floods out from the core of the device. The screen flickers briefly, covered in nonsense strings of text, until the whine rises to an inaudible pitch and, without warning, both the Generator and the lights overhead go out in a shower of sparks.

The skeleton blinks and lets his socket start glowing. Alphys has flinched away from the machine with a yelp and is now getting to her feet. There's a smell of burned rubber filling the air. "seems like a bust," the skeleton comments idly.

He can tell Alphys wants to throw snark back at him, but stops herself and merely frowns instead. She starts tugging at her sleeve. "W-well, the only other option for keeping a s-soul pod running here is the DT Extractor. B-but then it won't be in stasis." She looks at the skeleton questioningly.

Sans has to stop and think.

The soul looked like it was about ready to tear itself apart before the stasis stabilized it. Letting it back into the regular time flow might not be a good idea. But they don't exactly have any other option, do they? He already had a guess that the secondary Stasis Generator wouldn't work, it's stayed forgotten too long, it's too damaged. But if the soul turns out to be too unstable to stay on its own, they'll have to figure out how to get it running, and Sans is all but certain that'd take _forever_.

The skeleton shrugs. "might as well try." He waves another shortcut into existence next to them. This time, he offers his hand for Alphys to take instead.

She stares at it with an annoyed grimace, then with curiosity. "Do I h- _have_ to be touching you to pass through?"

Sans nods with a simple 'yep' and gestures toward the open shortcut. Looking puzzled, Alphys steps close and tries to put her hand through it, but she's met with a barrier. The way is open, but to her it feels like a flat surface, just like the back of the crack would feel like normally. To illustrate his point, Sans widens the tear a bit and steps through himself, then presses his palm to the lizard's to let her follow him. Once he's sure she's safely across, he lets the shortcut close.

Alphys is still looking at the spot with her brow furrowed. "W-what happens if I'm halfway across a-and you let go?" she asks.

"you get cut in half," Sans replies emotionlessly. He doesn't have to look to know Alphys goes pale.

The skeleton turns his attention elsewhere, to the DT Extractor instead. He's brought them to the edge of the pit that surrounds it. The skull-like contraption hangs above the blackness like a vulture over a soon-to-be corpse. The dark metal of the skull face has a reddish tinge in the low light.

"O-oh," he hears the lizard mumble finally.

Alphys shuffles uncomfortably on the spot, fidgeting with her buttons, until she just turns to the wall without a word. A few prods in the right places makes one of the metal panels sink a few inches, which then lets the lizard slide it up and out of the way to reveal the control station for the Extractor; just a simple screen and keyboard, like the Generator before. Alphys presses the power button, but this time there's no whine, no lights. It's just the screen that comes to life. She clicks through a few menus into the programming of the device, and types for a little while. The machine stays inert.

"O-okay, I changed the settings s-so it won't automatically activate when it detects a s-soul signature." Alphys navigates back to the main options.

With a mouse click the Extractor shudders on its support, and grinds down and forward on an articulated arm, until it's close enough to the edge that Sans could stretch out his hand and touch it, the thick tubing trailing behind like medusa hair. Another click, and a hiss of pressurized air rings out as the skull splits exactly down the middle. The halves roll away to either side of the contraption. Three slots light up, two higher ones matching the positions of the sockets of the skull, the third lined up with, for lack of a better word, the mouth. Only the top pair is built to house soul pods. The third slot bears a nozzle at the top, and is full of little adjustable grabbing arms beneath it, tiny metal clamps meant to fit virtually any shape and size of receptacle for the soul extract.

Alphys steps away from the keyboard. "I-it's on stand-by now. Let's go c-check on the soul."

Sans nods and forms a third shortcut, to the basement of the Royal Castle. This time it's Alphys who grabs his arm without prompting, so they step through as soon as the crack is big enough. The skeleton keeps this one open, though; they'll need it to transport the soul pod.

There's the Stasis Generator proper. A massive machine, like a warped, scaled-up version of its secondary kin. Instead of wires, it has massive tubes covering its sides and front, and a bright white radiance shines from its core through the gaps. The screen and keyboard combo here feel downright minuscule in comparison to the Generator itself even though they're the same size as their kin. The seven soul pods are perched in a neat row at the top, on the ends of pistons that, at the moment, are retracted. Above each of them is a hatch on the ceiling leading to the Barrier, and behind the two monsters is a long hall with the coffins, each decorated with a colored heart and bearing a human inside it, the owners of the souls hanging far above them. The whole thing is wreathed in solid mist, a smaller, infinitely weaker simile of the Barrier itself to keep the souls protected.

Alphys only spares a momentary glance behind her. She shuffles up to the keyboard and types a few things, clicks through some menus; the shielding haze around the Generator dissipates. Sans watches over her shoulder while she works her way into the power management section.

"...I c-can't pull just the seventh soul out of stasis," Alphys says after a while. "I-I have to deactivate the stasis o-on all of the pods."

The skeleton's sockets scan the row of souls. As far as he knows, the other have nothing wrong with them. There'd be no harm in letting them back into the regular time stream, right? He shrugs. "go ahead."

With a nervous nod, the Royal Scientist goes back to the console. A few key presses later, the light from within the Generator flickers and dies with a deep, thrumming noise that fades into a faint electrical hum.

Sans has his sockets on the red pod as the stasis is lifted. The soul inside begins to convulse almost immediately, exactly the same way as it was before, its brilliant red flashing madly and dimming with every passing second. Slowly though, the shaking stops, but the red doesn't come back. When the heart stills completely, its color is that of blood, a clotted maroon so dark the black line in the middle of it is barely visible.

Frisk's glimmer is so faint as to be almost unnoticeable.

Sans actually feels the smallest hint of fear brush past him like a feather, but... the glimmer's faint, but it's _there_. It's not waning further.

They both wait and watch with bated breath, for seconds that might as well be dozens of minutes.

Then, suddenly, the black line vanishes and the heart flares with red all over again like a rekindled fire, its glow so fierce that both Sans and Alphys flinch and avert their eyes. The color is so intense it even manages to tint the souls next to it a little bit.

The lizard has confusion etched across her features. "Is it... f-fixed?"

Sans shakes his head. "can't be."

What happened? The soul was all but tearing itself apart before it went into stasis, and the stasis itself isn't meant for stabilizing souls, not even the pod is, it just freezes them in time. Is this what would've happened before if he hadn't used his blue magic? What in the world is going on with it, anyway? All those black slashes and the red flickering in and out, it's all so strange. Nothing like Sans has ever seen. They'll have to keep a close eye on the soul while it's in the DT Extractor.

For now though, they have to actually move it there. "let's just grab it."

Alphys is jolted back into action. "Oh, r-right." She sidles back over to the screen and taps a few more keys, then steps away again. The screen is waiting for confirmation to cut the power to the red pod now. "O-okay, like we u-used to do, Sans."

The skeleton splays out a hand toward her. The telltale glow of blue magic emanates from her chest and curls around her limbs in misty wisps. The lizard floats upward as he raises his arm slowly, until the top of the machine is within reach and she can climb on. His hand then swivels to face the pod instead. With a nod from Alphys, Sans taps the Y key. There's a distinct noise of machinery unlocking. The pod comes free just as his socket flares up and the whole thing is wreathed in blue and lifted a few inches. Alphys lunges forward and cups her hands around the bottom of the pod, claws sparking as she fuels her magic into it. Below, Sans splays his other hand out toward the lizard. Her chest glows with blue again, and together both she and the pod are gently moved off the machine and lowered to the floor, where the magic around Alphys fades a second time.

Before, when the Royal Scientist was experimenting with DT, she'd fit the soul pods into a mobile station after getting them off the Generator, but Sans' shortcut renders it moot.

He lets Alphys take the lead. She's shuffling slowly, walking backward so as to keep the pod floating between them. She positions herself right by Sans' shortcut, then has to wait for him to step close as well. The hand holding the pod up comes to rest on the glass for convenience, while his other finds Alphys' shoulder so she can start reversing through the shortcut, back into the underground lab. Slowly, carefully, the pair make their way through, and Sans lets the shortcut close behind him.

They lift the pod up to the Extractor's left socket, their right. It slots in with a dull click and a whirr. A low buzz of electricity begins to emanate from the machine as power flows through it for the first time in quite a while. The skeleton's socket fades back to the usual white dot, while Alphys hurries over to the console in the wall.

"It's stable," she breathes. A few key presses later, and the two halves of the machine's metal façade roll forward and join again, leaving the radiant red heart to illuminate the left socket of the skull.

A small part of Sans wants to smile at the symbolism.

"scan it," he says instead, turning away. "get the signature," he adds when he steps over to Alphys' side to look at the screen.

"O-oh, sure."

All it takes is a single click, and several little spotlights come to life all around the soul. A whine of flowing magic rings out as the lights begin to flash and flicker, seemingly at random. On the screen, a new window pops up:

MAPPING SOUL TRAITS  
PLEASE STAND BY...

Below the words, a circle spins for a little while, then gets shunted down when more text appears. The line of 'SOUL SIGNATURE' is quickly replaced by 'HUMAN SIGNATURE #7', followed by a percentage that climbs to 100 and shifts to 'ACQUIRED'. The text turns red.

Then, another 'SOUL SIGNATURE' pushes the spinning icon further down.

This line of text doesn't change. The percentage doesn't appear. For a few minutes, it just sits there on the screen, inert, while the circle spins under it. Then the later vanishes, only for an error message to appear instead.

                                                                     HUMAN SIGNATURE #7     ACQUIRED  
                                                                      SOUL SIGNATURE ##         **ERROR  
**** > TRAITS MISSING - ****BV** **IT** **JT** **KD** **PS** **PT  
**** > UNKNOWN TRAIT DETECTED**


	11. Downtime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a few little scenes with all the characters, nothing major.

In the underground of the Underground, beneath a complicated machine, is a lizard.

Alphys is on her back, on a folded-out portion of the wall that forms the pit under the DT Extractor. Through the control station, which sits open and lit, she's maneuvered the machine itself into a vertical position, and now she has the back of it open and is fiddling with the inner mechanisms. Beneath her precarious perch is something like a metal, upside-down umbrella, for catching any tools she might drop. Alphys has already lost way too many of them to this stupid, pointless pit. Why is it even here? She doesn't even know what's at the bottom of it. Other than her lost tools, that is.

Sans left shortly after they got the soul in place and received that cryptic readout of its signature, insisting that there was no reason to fuss about it, but the Royal Scientist refuses to listen. It is partially out of spite, yes, but also because working keeps her mind off... other recent events. She has a puzzle to solve, science to do. It's a prime excuse to just... wall off a few things, at least until tomorrow.

The lizard's hands drop to her chest, still holding the screwdriver and pliers. One of them lets go to rub over Alphys' eyes under her glasses while she groans.

Ugh. It's late, she's tired, and there's that damned ceremony tomorrow. She'd much rather just mourn in private. She's already awkward enough around people without blubbering her scales off.

She looks back up at the guts of the Extractor. Above her are several rectangular metal plates, each with a grid of holes. Each plate holds a specific number of gemstones in a specific shape that can only fit that one plate, and the arrangement of said gemstones, _somehow_ , defines what the Extractor will get out of whatever soul it contains when it's activated. Even the blueprints Alphys used weren't completely clear on how the system works, other than providing the preset configurations corresponding to each known Soul Trait. Something about magical resonance and other such nonsense that she couldn't make heads or tails of.

The scientist sets the tools on her chest aside, just in case they decide to slide off into the pit, and props herself up on her elbows. She has to lean to the side to look at the terminal on the far wall, which makes the platform she's on creak ominously, but she knows it won't fall. The screen is the exact same as when she started. There's the window with the two signatures, and another reading 'ATTEMPTING TRAIT ALIGNMENT - PLEASE RECONFIGURE ATTUNEMENT GEMS'.

"Yeah, I _know_ ," she grumbles at the terminal.

Alphys has been messing with the gems for the better part of the past few hours, trying in vain, through trial and error, to get them to align with whatever unknown Trait the machine detected on the second soul signature. Which shouldn't even be present to begin with! How can there be two signatures in only one soul?! It makes absolutely zero sense! Augh!!!

She claws at her forehead and feels a scale come loose. Great. Alphys just lets the chunk of keratin drift into the darkness below. She gathers she tools scattered all around her, throwing each one back to the ledge around the pit, then crawls out from under the Extractor. She has to lean down over the edge to unhook the platform and let it fold back down, but she's used to it. Alphys pulls herself to her feet and pads over to the terminal, one hand on the wall, the other holding her glasses and rubbing over her eyes again.

God, she's so tired. What time is it anyway? She has no idea. She didn't even eat dinner.

A few key presses later and the Extractor whirrs back down to a vertical position. Bathed in the crimson glow of the seventh soul, Alphys seriously does try to gather her tools back up, really, but she's practically falling over as it is. She just ends up pushing them against the wall instead. She'll need them for later anyway.

The Royal Scientist practically crawls her way through the dark halls of the old lab complex. It's a good thing she knows her way around like the back of her hand on this level. And it's also a good thing that the amalgamates aren't around anymore. She wouldn't want to accidentally stumble into one.

Her hand suddenly reaches into empty air and Alphys almost trips and falls. She catches herself on the headboard of a bed. Looking around, the lizard realizes she's reached the room with the beds, where they are all lined against the walls. Damn, if only she weren't so hungry, she could just...

Almost as if responding to her thoughts, that one tall, slender amalgamate fades into existence right in front of her, but Alphys is so drowsy she doesn't even jump. Her eyes just go up to the thing's head(?), then back down when she notices movement. The entity has extended a limb toward her, and the growth on the end opens to reveal a bag of chisps.

"O-oh. Thanks." She plucks it out. The plastic feels sticky. _Ew._ "U-um. Can you, uh, get me another one?" Alphys is _really_ hungry.

The amalgamate nods and, as always, fades away noiselessly. While it's gone, Alphys drags herself over to the nearest bed and sinks into it with all the grace of a bird being shot out of the sky. She rolls over and manages to pull herself sitting, open the bag, wipes her hand clean, and start eating the chisps one by one, before the amalgamate returns to her bedside and hands her another bag, which she sets aside for later. How is it even getting these out of the machine?

"Thanks," she says simply. The thing pats her on the head, then fades out. Well, that one's not so bad after all, is it?

She ought to come up with a name for it.

Tomorrow.

Maybe.

~~~~~~~~

High, high, high above the Underground, but still below the mountain, is a skeleton.

Sans has retreated to one of his secluded spots for the night. After helping Alphys, and that whole mess with the 'unknown trait' or whatever the hell that was, he really did want to stick around and discuss it, but... _ugh_. He just didn't have the will for it. And Asgore only wanted them to work on the seventh soul after the fancy burial ceremony, anyway. No reason to worry about that nonsense now.

He's sitting on the back on one of his shortcuts, and has his back to the other end of it. The ceiling of the great cavern that forms the Underground is only a couple meters above him, and all around him are massive stalactites, like the teeth of a gargantuan beast. Each pointed end holds a massive, glowing crystal, but their bodies are also peppered with much smaller, shimmering shards, too small to be visible from the floor. But here, sitting among them, Sans can almost fool himself that he's sitting among the stars, out in space.

Free.

The skeleton huffs through his teeth. Yeah, right. Keep dreaming, bonehead.

He can get a little bit close to that, though. And after... well, _everything,_ he could do with some not-quite-alone time.

Sans gets to his feet atop his down-facing shortcut. He dispels it and begins to plummet, feet-first. A crack forms, and then he's moving upward and upside-down, looking up at the Underground below. At the crest of his trajectory, he forms another shortcut, again right below him, and finally lands softly upon the blue stone of Waterfall. In front of him are the backs of a pair of crooked houses, one blue, the other pink.

The skeleton pads around to the front of the blue home and knocks thrice. After a moment, he hears the lock click and the door creak open. In the gap is a faintly-glowing ghost with large, dark eyes.

"oh... hi, sans..." Napstablook says.

"hey naps. mind taking me on a trip?"

The ghost blinks slowly. "i guess not... come in..." They drift aside, and Sans steps inside.

Everything looks about the same. Wooden floor in a state of disrepair, old computer in the corner, fridge, TV. The spooktune CDs have been stacked in another corner to make room for a low pull-along cart wagon filled with broken robotic parts. The spider web, that'd normally bear a fancy purple flyer for the bake sale, holds instead a single sheet of white paper emblazoned with large silver letters: 'IN MOURNING'.

For monsters, death is associated with white since monster dust is white.

"you can lie down... if you want to..." the ghost muses vaguely, drifting along like smoke, and coming to settle on the floor themself like chill mist. Sans joins them, the top of his skull close to the high, shifting arch of Napstablook's form.

"take me to the pillars of creation."

~~~~~~~~

Under a red-leaved tree, in a little underground hollow, is a flower.

Flowey was following the remaining main players of the underground for the past few hours, since he came out to talk to Asgore in that old office. But now, he's here. Inside Chara's grave again. There was never a coffin to begin with, Toriel left that behind, and even the bones themselves have turned to dust by now. There's only a small, child-sized space that, over the years, Flowey himself has smoothed into an oval bubble of air, with only the tiniest fissures through the soil above to let in a little bit of light.

Flowey's stem is coming out one the many holes he's left for himself along the walls. A vine extends from another and dips into the bone dust idly. He's not really aware of it. His eyes are unfocused and his mind is wandering, but not to the feedback from his vines. Flowey's concern is with things far less mundane.

Chara wanted to kill him, didn't they? Yesterday, just before they got to the Golden Hall and... died again. Wow, that sounds weird. He's used to thinking about multiple deaths for himself, but applying the concept to anyone else feels downright _wrong_ , somehow. Still, it's the truth, isn't it? Chara came back, somehow, in the body of that other kid, and then the trashbag actually managed to take them down.

The flower's, for lack of a better word, brow creases.

How did the skeleton even do that? He can put up one hell of a fight when he really wants to, sure, Flowey knows that well enough, and those damned skull things he uses are just the worst, but... nothing beats Determination. Flowey also knows that as a fact. His own stolen DT, and Chara's even greater cache, are a testament to that. Then how...?

...why didn't Chara reset?

Actually, no, scratch that. They did reset, multiple times, far too many to count. The fleeting ghost sensation of the foreign resets, of timespace being forced into submission by another entity, over and over again through the same knotted hole, ripples through him, and the flower can't help a slight cringe. Chara did reset in that corridor, but Sans still won.

 _How?_ Flowey just can't wrap his head around it. He saw it, clear as day, the Determination in Chara's eyes when they...

A shiver rattles his stem.

Did they really want to kill him? He and Chara had been inseparable as siblings. They played together, got in trouble together, slept in the same room, ate the same food, even wore the clothes, much to Chara's dismay whenever they'd accidentally grabbed a sweater he'd already worn and it'd be full of goat hair inside.

Flowey can feel... _something_. He's not really sure if it qualifies as nostalgia, but it's... nice, if only due to its novelty. He also realizes his stray vine has been doodling little flowers into the bone dust. Heh. Funny how even humans eventually turn to dust after they die.

No, he'd panicked. Chara wouldn't kill him. Chara's the only one who would understand how he feels. The utter, absolute _boredom_ of near-omnipotence. Seeing every tiny little change, every insignificant possibility and outcome to every single monster in the Underground. All without love, and happiness, or anything resembling a positive emotion.

Without a soul, Flowey is nothing but negativity, pain and fear and sorrow and paranoia. The exact line between what he can and can't feel is thin and fuzzy, even he doesn't know exactly where it is.

He wipes the childish flowers away and nods to himself.

Yes, Chara wouldn't kill him. He was the one who overreacted. Like a crybaby. Chara used to call him that, saying that he needed to be tougher, be stronger, or everyone would walk all over him and take advantage of his kindness. It was only after becoming a flower that he really understood. Chara had always wanted to help him, and isn't release from this loveless hell exactly what he'd been wishing for at the time? They'd just been trying to give him what he wanted, and he just had to go and start being _scared_. Like a stupid, silly little kid.

No. No more. Asriel died a long time ago. The only thing Flowey has from him is his bond with Chara. That's the only thing that matters right now.

Determination roils in his vines as the flower recedes into the dirt and darts away below the surface. He slips right beneath Sans, lying on the floor inside that depressed ghost's house. He dives along the elevator shaft below the Laboratory, and snakes around the outside of the metal-covered passages until he comes to a large room that reaches far below into the rock.

The home of the DT Extractor.

Flowey doesn't bother with finding a crack in the metal this time. He just bends one of the corners out with his vines to poke himself out of the dirt. If it weren't for the red light of the soul, he wouldn't be able to see anything at all.

As it is, however, the brilling crimson heart is like a target that's nothing but a bullseye.

Flowey's face splits into a grin as he extends himself on the end of a thorny stem. A pair of vines follow right behind his disc, reaching for the exposed soul pod. Those _idiots_. Leaving it vulnerable like this. When he takes this soul, he and Chara will be together again, and with the Determination to reset at will to boot! They'll be unstoppable!!!

The flower suddenly cringes back when his vision is filled with white, what the hell?!

Oh. Its one of the amalmagates. That really tall, lanky one with the big fat head that never makes any noise. It just... blinked into existence right in front of him, goddammit.

"What do _you_ want, freak?" Flowey hisses, but despite his thorny attitude he pulls the vines back into the dirt. He's tried toying with these things before, and he's not keen on repeating the experience.

The tall, white entity shows no reaction.

Flowey huffs petulantly. "Fine. I didn't want that soul anyway! _I don't even like red!_ " he whines before sinking into the dirt again.

Augh, he hates those stupid things!!!

~~~~~~~~

Within the great walls of grey stone of a castle is a Boss Monster.

1 and a half cups of packed brown sugar  
_4 tablespoons of cornstarch  
_ 3 tablespoons of all-purpose flour

Asgore is home again, and has been for a few hours. The fires of rage from earlier have mostly subsided, but there's still a tiny little candle flame burning in his chest, almost as a memorial to the dust-filled jar in his bedroom. It's a cool flame, as far as metaphorical fire goes. The first wave of earth-scorching rage crashed over him and has passed. Now there's only the hot-cold fury that he remembers feeling for a long time after losing his children.

2 cups of milk  
_3 egg yolks  
_ 2 tablespoons of butter

The king is sitting at the table. He has Toriel's favorite cookbook open on one side, a notebook with a cover of sunflowers in front of him, and a red pen in his claws. He's been copying the recipes he wants from the book by hand, which in itself is an arduous process. His size and strength means he has to write slowly so as to not risk tearing the paper of snapping the pen. Asgore's script is firm and flowing, with absolutely zero straight lines or sharp edges and plenty of curls and loops. From the kitchen drifts the growing smell of butterscotch. A little flower-pot-shaped timer ticks away at the corner of the table.

 _2 teaspoons of vanilla extract, separate  
_ _1 9-inch pie shell, baked_

He can still remember the first time he tasted Toriel's famous butterscotch pie. The first time he laid eyes on her and fell madly in love. It was at an end-of-year celebration, at a time when there was some tension with the humans, yes, but monsterkind was still free to roam the surface and mingle mostly unopposed with them. He'd been nothing but a young, rash teen back then, brimming with overconfidence due to his budding Boss Monster status.

3 egg whites  
_1/2 teaspoon of cream of tartar  
_ 1/2 cup of white sugar

Asgore remembers how the monsters of the village had all joined to put together a sumptuous banquet for everyone, each family and/or individual providing their best dish for the night. He remembers the great bonfire that'd been lit in the village square, with flames that sometimes climbed higher than some of the houses even. He remembers how the tables had been arranged in a circle around it, at a safe distance, so that the dishes would be kept warm by the heat and the people would stay safe.

In a double boiler, whisk together the brown sugar, flour, and cornstarch.  
Add just enough milk to make a paste.  
Mix in the beaten egg yolks, then add the remainder of the milk.

He got into a fight that night, as he was wont to do back in those days. He was strong, powerful, a Boss Monster, he could beat anyone! ...heh. Such young naiveté. The monster that'd challenged him has since been lost form his memory, but they'd been an adept user of blue magic, something Asgore had, at the time, very little experience with. Needless to say, he'd been tossed around like a ragdoll and, eventually, crashed into the circle of food-ladden tables, right into the dessert section.

Cook slowly, stirring constantly; when thick, remove from the heat.  
Add butter or margarine and 1 teaspoon of vanilla.  
Pour the filling into the baked pie shell.

The king's mouth tugs into an almost imperceptible smile. The next thing he knew, a monster was stomping toward him. And when he looked up at her, dress fluttering with fire, eyes burning, ears flying in the rush of air, and he became aware of a certain flavor on his tongue, he knew three things: whatever he'd landed mouth-first on was downright heavenly; this female monster was the most beautiful creature on the face of the earth; and he was both terrified and completely smitten by her.

In a separate mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until they become stiff.  
Beat in the cream of tartar, the white sugar, and the other teaspoon of vanilla.  
Spread the meringue over the pie filling.

Asgore made a complete fool of himself, of course. Stumbling over his words, stuttering like a forgetful songbird, slipping on the ruined sweets several times. He'd made such a mess failing to get up that Toriel had eventually broken down and begun to laugh so much she couldn't even help him to his feet. Gerson had teased him for days afterward, until he'd eventually worked up the courage to go talk to her again. The rest, as they say, is history. Literally, considering how long they've both lived.

_Bake at 190 °C until the meringue peaks turn-_

The flower pot timer goes off with a cheery little tune and jolts Asgore back to the present.

The king sighs deeply. The smell of butterscotch is stronger than ever, and exactly how he remembers it from when Toriel used to make it. He sets the pen down, clicks the flower back into place to make it stop singing, gets to his feet, and pads heavily into the kitchen. He dons a pair of oven mitts, pulls the appliance open, and lifts the finished pie up to the kitchen counter.

Asgore doubles back to the table and sinks into the chair again, which creaks in protest under his weight like it always does. The pen is tucked between his claws again.

_-a golden brown, roughly 10-15 minutes._


	12. The Ceremony and the Captain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you may have noticed that these past two sundays didn't have any chapters posted, and I'm very sorry about that. It was a combination of not being in the right headspace to write barely anything at all, having other things to worry about, and the chapter itself just plain not wanting to be written for some reason. But, I finally got it done.
> 
> However!  
> This week I started classes again, the second semester of the year and all, and I'm also working alongside studying. Last semester I had a guaranteed window of two free hours at campus every tuesday that I'd use to write my chapters, but this semester my week's full, classes from 8am to midday plus work from 2 to 8pm, and also another class on saturdays from 9 to 11am. What all of this means is that updates will have to go from 'every sunday' to 'on sundays when I have one ready'.  
> I'm sorry it has to be this way, but it's the best I can do if I still want to have time to manage the school work that'll be coming in later this year and, y'know, do things like drawing and talking to friends since I'm not a writing machine.
> 
> I'm very happy people are liking this silly little story of mine, though! I can't thank you enough, this has been a ton of fun to write. Some might even say... a skele-ton, perhaps?  
> And, if you're one of those people, do stick around! I've got some good stuff planned for the future. Things should hopefully start picking up after this point.
> 
> Just... bear with me, alright? Real life sucks.

The Underground mourns.

Dead. So many dead. Over three hundred dead.

Monsters weep. The Echo Flowers are silent. The fireflies are hidden. Even the crystals on the ceiling, such gross imitations of stars, are dimmed. A cloud of sorrow hangs across the titanic cave system, like a flock of carrion eaters waiting to feast upon the dying.

All across the Underground, families, friends, colleagues, gather in their time of grief. The boat driver is silent as they ferry monsters to and fro. On foot and by river, hundreds move across the tunnels, the paths, the roads and craggy walls, toward a singular location at the far end of the cave. Amidst the grey stone they gather, easily a thousand monsters crowded in the Capital Square, clustered in small groups, forming a warped reverse beehive from above.

The dome of the great cathedral stands tall above the scene. Impassive. Unfeeling. Cold, grey rock, shaped and carved.

It is to this scene that Asgore arrives. The golden pauldrons are nowhere to be found. Today, there's only the gold of his beard, the dark metal of his armor, and a long, white cape. He carries a white, rune-covered urn under one arm and an old cookbook under the other when he walks out into the open patio of the Square.

The few low voices heard across the space are quickly hushed. Asgore doesn't need to stand on a raised platform to be seen. There is a podium however, complete with microphone, waiting for him. He sets the two items upon it and picks up the mic.

The King's eyes scan the crowd. Each cluster of monsters has at least one member clutching a burial urn and a beloved item of the fallen. Sad faces stare back at him, faces full of sorrow, anger, regret, numbness, disbelief, both tear-stained and dry. A good portion of the crowd, however, doesn't look at him, aside from perhaps a momentary glance. They don't need to. They know what they'll see. Or they just don't care. Whatever the case, Asgore doesn't mind.

He draws in a breath. His voice, amplified through the microphone and speakers, reverberates across the Square, deep, thrumming, sorrowful but comforting.

"Greetings. I will not call you citizens, but dear friends. We are gathered here today to mourn, yes, but also to remember those who have had their lives stolen from them. Today, I am not your king. I open my heart and soul to you, and offer a safe place for you to let your sorrows flow. We will mourn the dead together, cherish their memories, their feats and their once-presence, and we will look forward to a bright future of freedom."

A wave of fresh tears begins to fall among the crowd. Arms wrap around hiccupping shoulders, murmurs of soothing words are spoken.

"No monster is too small to be forgotten, no death too insignificant to not be mentioned. From those who were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, to those who willingly cast their lives against the path of destruction for the sake of others, they will be remembered. Starting with the froggits, whimsuns, loox, vegetoids and moldsmals of the Ruins, those few who knew Queen Toriel in her time of exile."

Several groups of monsters huddle closer together. Croaked sobs and wet noises of sorrow are heard. The king feels the candle flame of cold fury in his chest flare brighter, for just a moment, and the cookbook on the podium seems to burn with invisible flames below the microphone.

"In Snowdin, the Ice Village suffered the most, losing several icecaps and young icedrakes, but a lonely gyftrot who perished in the forest will not be forgotten. The Canine Unit of the Royal Guard, Doggo, Lesser Dog, Greater Dog, Dogamy and Dogaressa, stood bravely against the threat, and their feats of selflessness shall go down in history. Papyrus the sentry, one of the kindest souls I have ever had the pleasure to meet, attempted diplomacy despite his own fear."

Cold feathers droop and sad chirps ring out. A half-molten icedrake's form begins to sag, only to be pulled back together by an unscarred bird. A dog's warped, gurgled whine is, for a moment, louder than the rest, but soothed by kind words from the rabbit family. A short skeleton, not too far from the podium, sitting alone and with hollow sockets, shows no reaction.

"Waterfall saw the deaths of woshuas, aarons, moldyboggs, several other moldsmals, and a single unlucky Temmie. An aspiring singer and a ghost with dreams of grandeur fell. And there, the Captain of the Royal Guard, the great Undyne, saved a child from certain doom at the cost of her own life. Even after death, she was a mighty obstacle and a true hero. Her name shall go down in history as Undyne, the Undying, the heroine of the Underground."

Sudsy tears flow, damp muscles are flexed in remembrance. The group of Temmies vibrates quietly to one other. An eel-like creature, with a great toothy maw and strong arms, grumbles wordlessly under their breath, next to a ghost with a wheeled wagon full of broken robotic parts. An old turtle pats the back of a bespectacled lizard.

"The magma of Hotland was witness to the fall of vulkins, pyropes, and tsunderplanes. Two more members of the Royal Guard were lost in their brave attempt to avenge their fallen Captain, and the spiders saw their beloved leader be struck down in her own act of selflessness. The Core itself was violated. In it, several other desperate attempts at stopping the human were thwarted. The brave final froggits, wimsalots, astigmatisms, knight knights, and madjicks, shall never be forgotten. Even the star of the Underground, the famous robot Mettaton, stood tall and fearless to defend his beloved fans."

Magma boils, fire crackles and engines are revved in grief. A small cluster of guards, those who are not standing along the edges of the Square, console one other. A mass of spiders chitters softly amongst themselves. More croaks are heard, swords are unsheathed, shining tricks are performed. A trio of two cats and an alligator share a sob-filled hug.

Asgore himself feels scalding tears begin to soak into his beard, but his voice remains strong.

"There are many to remember, and yet more to console. My heart and soul weep with you, dear friends. We shall overcome this tragedy together, as we always have. I ask you, friends, to hold onto your hopes, your dreams, while you cherish the memories of the fallen. We owe it to them to make the best out of what we have. And we shall now give them the farewell they deserve."

The king sets the microphone down, and replaces it with Toriel's urn. All across the square, monsters mimic him. Those few who aren't capable or can't muster the courage are aided by others.

Asgore takes the cookbook and paces around the podium, in full view of the crowd. He kneels upon the cold, grey stone, and the bereaved follow as closely as each of their unique anatomies allows. The book, and the hundreds of other items, are set down upon the floor. Almost in unison, the burial urns are opened, and tipped forward.

The quiet noise of flowing dust fills the air, like the whispers of the dead themselves offering consolation to one another. The shimmering white powder soaks into each carefully-chosen item, binds across their surfaces like glitter. Each and every object gains a shifting sparkle, a permanent mark of its former owner's presence.

Urns are closed and set aside. Every monster chooses their own form of dealing with the now consecrated objects. Some, in the case of clothing items for example, don them respectfully. Others stow the item away in their person, in a safe place. Yet others prefer to treat the dust-imbued objects with reverence, and will, soon, put them on display in their homes, or store them in secret.

Asgore himself tucks the glittering cookbook under his cape for safekeeping, until he can store it in its proper place in his kitchen. He notices Sans wrap an orange, ragged cloth, sparkling with dust, around his neck nearby as everyone rises to their feet, or their own closest anatomical equivalent.

The king returns to his podium and the microphone on it.

"The fallen are at peace. Their memories are the legacy we shall carry into the future as one. Do your grieving, friends, and look forward to freedom."

A few hopeful smiles are shared. Others, however, can only cling to the dusty item of the fallen, or the empty urn that until just moments prior held the dust itself. The king wipes away his own tears openly, takes a steadying breath, and straightens his back.

"The Burial Ceremony is now over. You may return to the privacy of your homes, but know that my soul goes with you. Farewell."

There are some replies, but the majority of the crowd begins to scatter in silence, the small groups still tightly knit.

 

Now, it's time for business.

 

Asgore tucks the empty urn under an arm and waits by the podium. He sees Gerson give Alphys a few last words of encouragement before she joins her old friends, Bratty and Catty, who help her transport an oversized, dust-caked sword that she'd once made for Undyne. The old turtle limps slowly through the crowd, offering kind words to anyone he can, until he finally comes to Asgore. They share a simple smile as a greeting.

"So, where are those promising guards I'm supposed to give a stern talking to?" Gerson says.

The king manages a small laugh. "They will join us shortly inside the cathedral. Follow me."

The high, grey dome is wide and empty inside. Ornate pillars stand at regular intervals, and tall, glassless windows show the surrounding area, the flow of colors as monsters file past them. There are no benches, no altars. Only a few strategically-placed torches to help light the space, and great painted murals covering the walls, a visual history of monsterkind.

The king and the old turtle wait in the center of the expanse. "There are four candidates," Asgore says. "Each one holds a high rank in the Royal Guard, and has their own way of approaching obstacles."

"Wa ha ha! Everyone does!" Gerson laughs, tapping his cane on the floor with a dry little _clack_ each time. "And I'll bet all of them will swear by it that their method's the best there is. But we'll see!"

Each candidate for the position of captain arrives a few minutes after the one before them, all clad in the typical armor of dark metal, though none quite as dark as Asgore's own near-black armor.

The first monster is a heavy arthropod of some sort, with many bulky limbs and a single massive horn poking through the front of their helmet. When they remove it, it's to reveal multiple compound eyes and a complicated set of articulated mandibles. Their exoskeleton bears a striking golden sheen, and it's clear that the armor pieces strapped over it are serving more as uniform and less as protection.

The second is somewhere between lizard and mammal. They have a long, reptilian snout, pointed ears, two pairs of pure white eyes with slitted pupils, and tiny interlocking scales of a silvery color. Their ankles are high off the ground, and behind them is a long, sinuous tail, bearing visible scars along its exposed length. Their armor is light, a lot less metal than the standard guard outfit, a lot more exposed skin and loose chainmail.

The third can best be described as a minotaur. They tower over the other two even without the large, curved horns upon their bovine head, which is covered in fur of deepest black and bears a single pair of vibrant emerald eyes. Their split hooves are held together by horseshoes with backward spikes on the bottom, just barely visible whenever they take a step, and they are practically buried in heavy metal from head to hoof.

The last candidate is quite small. They're a rodent-like creature, whose large ears fold out when they take off their helmet. They have a mostly standard armor set, except for a few missing pieces around the neck and shoulder areas. Their fur is an eye-catching magenta.

Each of the four comes to a halt a few meters away from the wizened turtle and gives a salute. In the end, they are standing side by side, helmets under their arms, awaiting further instruction.

"I will give you all some space," Asgore says before retreating to the far wall. This is his friend's job, not his. He only chose the most promising options, those he thought capable of handling the magnitude of the role of Captain.

Gerson only gives a small nod to the goat monster. He smacks the cane across his scaly palm, his one good eye scanning the row of monsters. "What a treat! Quite the display you all make, huh? It could almost be a competition for the Underground's Most Eye-Gouging Guard! Wa ha ha!" There's no bite to his words. He sounds pleased, if anything. The king smiles subtly to himself. "Alright, we'll do this in order of arrival then, so you three, go stand over there and wait your turn!"

The silver, black, and magenta monsters move away below another mural, leaving only the golden beetle and the turtle in the middle of the space. Each one, in turn, is put through the same test by Gerson: dish out their best attack while he hides in his shell, then showcase their own strategy against an incoming attack, whatever it may be. Asgore merely watches from afar. He's not worried for Gerson, he knows he turtle can take whatever the candidates can dish out. There's a reason why he's lived so long despite not being a boss monster.

The soldiers each get to display their choice in summoned weaponry. A lot of regular monsters choose to fight with summoned constructs instead of plain magic attacks, but in the Royal Guard every soldier needs to have a signature weapon of their own that they're adept with. It is, and has always been, a vital part of training for any serious fighter. Asgore's weapon is his crimson trident. Toriel's used to be an indigo staff, rather uniquely. Gerson's was a golden warhammer. Grillby had a pair of shining, white-hot rapiers, once upon a time.

The golden beetle, a female monster named Aura, uses a pair of massive yellow gauntlets to pummel Gerson's shell and send him spinning across the stone floor. She defends against the swing of Gerson's hammer by standing her ground and shielding herself with all four of her bulky, carapaced arms.

The silver hybrid, who identifies themself simply with a signed number 8, chooses instead to throw the turtle around with their tail and hit it with a pair of white daggers. They choose to dodge rather than defend against Gerson's attack, but when prompted to stand their ground they redirect the second blow effectively.

The minotaur, a male named Oxull, doesn't attack at all, but instead merely picks up Gerson and sets him on his domed back, reasoning that, were it a real fight, this would be enough to incapacitate the turtle. He does, however, show his weapon of choice when Gerson's turn to strike comes. The bull roots himself in place with green magic, and summons a shield of the same color that not only stops the turtle's hammer but also forces it to dissipate, as expected.

Finally, the magenta mouse, the smallest of the four, identifies themself as Daban. They attack by propelling arrow-shaped magic attacks with a summoned bow, colored cyan, and like 8 before them also dodges Gerson's attack. When asked, they claim that they would not be able to stand their ground, since their fighting style revolves around avoidance.

"Now that was a fine show of skill if I ever saw one!" the turtle exclaims once all four candidates have passed the test. They're standing in line again, waiting for Gerson's decision. The shell on his back shows no damage whatsoever. "Come on over, Fluffybuns, let's make it official!" Gerson calls over his shoulder.

The borrowed pet name stings, but Asgore steps forward regardless. He comes to the turtle's side and summons his own trident. "Who shall become the new Captain of the Royal Guard?" The king's deep voice echoes across the cathedral.

Gerson slaps the cane across his palm again. "Well, these are all excellent soldiers you've got here, Fluffybuns! But right now, what the Underground needs is someone who can keep people calm. Times are tough! We need a firm hand on the leash! And that's why I think _you're_ the monster for the job!"

The turtle's cane is pointed at Oxull. The minotaur nods respectfully.

"The rest of you are dismissed!" Gerson goes on. The other three candidates give their salutes and leave. Then the turtle himself offers Asgore a slight bow, one hand held out toward the remaining soldier. "Here ya go, Fluffybuns. That's your new Captain! But now I'm going back home. I'm too old to be getting knocked around like that! Wa ha ha!"

The king chuckles. "Thank you for your help, old friend."

Gerson shakes his head. "It was nothing." He turns to leave, but pauses to give Oxull a pat on the arm since he can't reach the minotaur's shoulder. "Good luck, son. You'll do fine." A quiet 'thank you' is the soldier's response before Gerson shuffles off, cane _clack_ ing rhythmically against the stone floor with every other step.

Asgore is alone with Oxull now. He draws himself up to his full height and kingly manner. "Oxull of Hotland, will you serve monsterkind to the best of your ability, for as long as you carry the title of Captain of the Royal Guard?"

"Yes."

"Do you swear to aid those in need, to protect the innocent, to uphold the Law and to deal out punishment as justice demands it?"

"Yes."

"Will you, in full control of your faculties, submit to punishment yourself should you ever misuse the authority of the role of Captain, or commit any form of transgression while in the exercise of your position?"

"Yes."

The king smiled broadly. "Then, Oxull of Hotland," he touched the trident to the minotaur's shoulders on either side, "I hereby name you Captain Oxull, head of the Royal Guard. From now on you will report directly to me, and will command every soldier in the Underground."

The minotaur bowed. "Yes, sir Dreemur. Thank you."


	13. Matters of the Heart

Sans hasn't been to his private lab in a long time.

The lights are off. It's only the glow of his socket, the flashing cyan and yellow, that illuminate the room. He didn't even bother to use the actual door, he just took a shortcut from his room, so the place is still locked as well. The air is musty, in that way that only a room that's been closed for a long time can smell like. He doesn't look at the old, broken-down machine, hidden behind the tarp, or at the blueprints scattered across the worktop, stolen from the actual Lab in Hotland.

No, the skeleton's attention is on an old photograph. The colors have long since faded, whether by magic or just the wear of time itself, nothing but grey sepia tones now. But Sans knows what the real thing looked like. He was there.

It's a picture of him, Papyrus and Gaster, all together celebrating the old man's birthday. The guy never liked being reminded of his age, but this one had been special. The cake was absolutely covered in tiny little individual candles, so many the frosting was invisible and they were spilling over the sides, he could even see the beginnings of a small fire spreading across the table cloth on the picture.

The memory, like the photo, is faded, but Sans still remembers counting out the 1000 candles by hand, one by one, to put on the cake that Papyrus made and turned out to be nothing but spaghetti shaped into a rectangle and covered in sugary paste (nobody ate it). All three of them are smiling in the picture, even if Gaster looks like he's about to die of shame. Papyrus has an arm hooked around the taller skeleton, waving at the camera excitedly, and Sans is on Gaster's other side, also waving but more sedately of course. There's a tiny bit of his handwriting on a corner of the paper.

'don't forget'.

Sans' socket focuses on the old scientist's flustered face. Looking at this, you'd never guess the kind of fucked up shit they used to do behind Papyrus' back.

He folds the photo along its well-worn creases and tucks it back into the usual pocket. He came here to grab something, not reminisce about a reality that's since been lost forever.

The stuff he has in here is all things he helped Gaster with, it's only fair he'd keep them to himself. Alphys would have no use for them anyway. With the possible exception of the big, broken contraption in the corner, but that was what started the whole mess in the first place. He's not messing with it if he can avoid it.

Sans curls a hand in front of his chest, and lets his soul form in the cage of his finger bones. The white, upside-down heart adds its dim glow to the flashing of his socket. He lifts it up, to take a closer look at it.

That dark scar is still there, unchanged. It's a blemish on the very center of his soul, a spot of darkest black that reaches out toward the edges of the heart in static tendrils, half-healed cracks wanting to open again. With the white glow around it, the black looks even darker than it really is, more like an unimaginably deep pit than a stain.

Like his shortcuts before they align to their destination.

Sans lets the heart shape dissipate back into him.

The kid's soul had black in it as well up until just recently. It _can't_ be a coincidence. Granted, his has been around for years, but... there _has_ to be a connection of some kind. Souls don't just get marks on them like that for no reason. Gaster knew this better than anyone, and now Sans does too ever since that experiment failed horribly. He almost got taken under with it, it _has_ to have been the cause of this... dark thing on his soul.

Sans highly doubts the kid's been tainted by the Void directly, but he can't shake the feeling that this is all coming from the same place. And... there _is_ something he could do to help him cement that hypothesis.

...heh. "Hypothesis'. Look at him using science speak all over again.

The skeleton shakes his head, then crouches down and yanks the doors below the blueprint-laden worktop open. Inside are various contraptions he took from the Lab, stuff he didn't want anyone else knowing about. He's just interested in one thing, however. Something he and Gaster named the 'Soul Displacer'.

It's a weird little device. There's basically two parts to it connected by a thick, flexible tube. One half is a very basic soul pod, just enough to contain any kind of soul in place, the same height as the standard ones but narrower. The other half, however, can best be described as an extremely high-tech but backward vest. It's meant to clamp around the chest, with the tube coming out the front and the locks on the back, and several dials and buttons and other such input options all around the base of the tube. The Soul Displacer took a lot of tries to perfect, and even now it still isn't completely safe.

It's Sans' only option for what he wants to do, though.

The soul pod he tucks under an arm, the tube he loops around his neck, and the vest part he drapes over his forearm, leaving his other limb free. A quick shortcut later and he's in Hotland, briefly, before he ducks into the Lab. Alphys should be waiting for him somewhere, most likely down with the Extractor again trying to get the Attunement Gems to work. But he still checks here, on her desk and her room, before taking another shortcut to the proper location.

Yep, there she is. On her back under the Extractor again. Figures. "heya," he calls out.

To her credit, the lizard's only a little bit startled. She must've been expecting him. "A-ah, Sans! Do you r-really have to-" She notices the Displacer. "Um. W-what's that thing you're holding?"

Sans just shakes his head. "you'll see. any luck with the gems?"

Alphys bares her fangs in frustration. " _No._ N-nothing. W-we're not going to get anywhere a-at this rate." She rolls onto her side and crawls out from under the Extractor, rubbing her eyes and popping her back. "W-we need a quicker way to f-find the Attunement P-Pattern for the new Trait."

The skeleton stares up at the metal face of the device, then at the glowing terminal sunk into the wall.

ATTEMPTING TRAIT ALIGNMENT - PLEASE RECONFIGURE ATTUNEMENT GEMS

The screen's still the same as ever. Not even a progress bar. Sans knows one is supposed to show up when the machine starts resonating with the wanted trait. Even if it's just for a .5% or less. But here, even with all of the gems in place and all the reshuffling Alphys has been doing, there's still nothing.

If Sans' theory is correct though, then maybe that's the whole problem.

He actually feels his mouth tug into a smile. Not as big as the usual frozen grin, but still very much visible and present. Heh. Experimentation. It's almost like he never left the Lab in the first place. It feels... nostalgic. He's not really sure if that's a good thing or not.

"how about a fresh start then? i've heard it's the best thing when you're stuck on something." Sans pads over to the Extractor, opens a wide shortcut where Alphys had been lying just moments prior, then unceremoniously slams his fist into the side of the machine, rattling it hard enough to dislodge several gems from their metal frames and make them fall through the crack below.

"Sans, don't!" the lizard shouts. But then a noise from the control terminal diverts her attention.

ATTEMPTING TRAIT ALIGNMENT  
|----------------------2%-----------------------

"What?" She wanders to the terminal almost dreamily. "B-but... the blueprints always s-said that you need a-all of the gems i-in their frames to g-get them to resonate w-with the soul properly."

The skeleton merely shrugs. "this one must be special then." He starts to pluck the gems out, one by one, and with each crystal that drops through the shortcut the percentage on the screen climbs higher.

Alphys seems confused, to say the least. "This c-can't be right..." she says aloud, mostly to herself, then looks over at Sans' shortcut. "W-where are you putting them?"

"under one of the sinks in the patient room."

"O-oh."

 

Eventually, the last gem falls.

TRAIT ALIGNMENT COMPLETE  
|||||||||||||||||||||||100%|||||||||||||||||||||||  
PLEASE INPUT PRELIMINARY DESIGNATION- **__________ (__)**

The lizard is still puzzled, but she apparently decides not to question it further. "So, w-what should we call it?"

Sans shakes his head. "i want to test something out first. that's what this is for." He indicates the Soul Displacer on his arm.

"Y-you still haven't told me w-what it is," Alphys mutters while Sans walks past her, so he can be next to the control terminal and the empty socket of the Extractor. He taps a few keys to make the metal façade split and roll out of the way before answering. He starts to shed the clothing layers on his upper half while he speaks.

"it's called a soul displacer. it can pull a soul away into a pod without disconnecting it from the host." That's the nice way of putting it, he adds mentally, but Alphys doesn't need to hear that part.

She still seems perturbed, though. "Um. I-isn't that... _dangerous_?"

"yep." The skeleton drops the last garment, his shirt, atop the messy heap next to him. He's bare from the waist up now, save for the pillows around his lumbar. They won't get in the way. "hurts like hell too," he concludes, setting the soul pod half on the floor so he can clamp the vest around his ribcage. Alphys is getting more and more worried, but he just doesn't have the will to care.

"U-um! Sans, are... a-are you sure about this? I mean, y-you're not... uh... I-I mean! Your soul is... f-fragile, isn't it? W-won't it be... affected o-or something?!"

Sans shrugs again, turning away from Alphys. The buckles on the back always have to be tightened by someone else. "might be. can you strap me in?" He's looking over his shoulder at her.

The lizard hesitates. She opens her mouth a few more times, wanting to argue, and each time closes it without a word. In the end, she just yanks the belts and buckles into place, making sure to pull everything as tight as possible according to Sans' instructions. "now put that in the extractor," he says once that's done, pointing at the soul pod now connected to his chest. Alphys, again, complies silently.

She can't contain her curiosity, though. "H-how does it work?"

"blue magic," the skeleton says simply. He pokes a few buttons, turns a few knobs on the vest, then curls his finger bones around a pair of handles on either side of the tube that, were he a fleshy monster, would be coming out directly over his heart. The connection to the soul pod is long enough that he can lean against the wall without having to worry about tugging on the soul pod, locked into place on the Extractor's left socket, right next to the red soul.

Sans takes a deep breath.

His eye flashes.

...

This is going to _suck_.

He lets the magic flow into the device, and braces himself.

There's a delay. The thing hasn't been used in years. It takes a little while for all the circuits to start working, for the lights to start blinking and the dials turning.

All at once though, Sans suddenly feels a pull on his soul. He has to grit his teeth against it. It's robotic. Artificial. It feels _wrong_ in the worst way possible. The whole mechanical vest starts to glow blue as it gathers his magic and pulls harder on its source, but he never lets it stop feeding into the Displacer.

When the pain starts, he almost welcomes it. It means the thing's working properly. His breath turns labored. He doesn't scream, even if his body badly wants to. He's good at bottling things up like that. He just locks his jaw, his nonexistent throat, around the noise, squeezes his sockets shut, and rides it out.

Little by little, inch by painstaking inch, his soul is pulled from the safety of his ribcage, wisps of white, black and blue starting to flow through the hose and up toward the awaiting pod.

Sans loses all sense of time. The skeleton has no idea how long it takes for his soul to fully form inside the pod. For all he knows, it was years, centuries even. Pain has a rather peculiar way of warping one's sense of reality. But, eventually, it begins to lessen, which Sans takes as a sign to stop feeding blue into the vest. He just barely manages to pry his socket open, in time to see the cobalt light fade from around the soul pod connected to him.

There it is. His soul. The white heart with a black mark on the center, dark tendrils reaching out toward the edges like it's about to shatter at a moment's notice. Sans lets out the breath he'd been holding. It still hurts, having his soul like this, but it's more of a dull ache than the mind-splitting agony from before.

"scan it," he says aloud.

Sans hears more than sees Alphys hurry to the terminal. He listens to her claws tap across the keyboard, trying to ground himself on the noise, on the cold metal pressing against his spine, on the chill air clinging to his ribs. He's having trouble staying focused. There's a vague, phantom feeling of weightlessness and detachment clouding his thoughts.

When the scanning lights begin to flash around his soul, Sans feels more exposed than he ever has in his life. It's as though every fiber of his body's being pulled apart and passed through a sieve, he can't help but cringe against the wall he's bracing himself on. He wouldn't be standing if it weren't for it.

"Do you w-want to see it?"

The skeleton has to shake his head to make sense of the words. Alphys is asking him a question. She got the readout, right? He should have a look at it, shouldn't he? Sans manages a nod, and holds out a hand in a silent request for help. His legs are nowhere near stable right now.

He feels Alphys' scaly limbs close around him. She tugs his arm over her shoulder, so she can half-guide, half-carry him over to the terminal. "A-are you okay?" she asks, but he can only give her an undefined noise in response. Sans has to stay clinging to her to read the screen, and even then it takes him a few seconds to focus his vision.

                                                            MONSTER SIGNATURE      **ERROR  
** ** > UNKNOWN TRAIT DETECTED  
**                                                                                                   POSSIBLE MATCHES FOUND IN DATABANK  
                                                                                                    > SANS SERIF GASTER, SKELETON  
** > ERROR- FILE NOT FOUND  
**                                                                                                    > PAPYRUS SCRIPT GASTER, SKELETON

Right. Words. Logic. God, he can barely think straight. Sans shakes his head again.

This looks about right, right? He never updated his signature file in the databank after the accident, it makes sense the machine wouldn't be able to match it now, yeah. He's got the same unknown trait as the kid's soul, which is what he was hoping to see, so that's good. And then there's Gaster's missing file, but no surprise there, he already knew that. He's too detached to even feel anything when his socket skims past Papyrus' name.

Ugh, god, he's getting drowsy now. Alphys says something but Sans can't make it out. He just wants to lie down and... yeah, that sounds nice. Just sleep. That's what he does all the time anyway. He can feel his frame sagging, his strength leaving him, his sockets drooping, Alphys says something again but he's just too far gone to care. Just a quick rest. It never hurt him before. A little nap, and then he'll go back to being bothered about everything being fucked.

He's suddenly aware that he's sitting on the floor. When did he sit? ... _is_ he sitting? His bones are kind of going numb, it's hard to tell. His sockets are half-lidded, but everything looks fuzzy. Like TV static. He used to try to see images in it sometimes when he was little. Sometimes, he could swear he'd seen a face, but it was never there long enough for him to be sure. Nothing but a quick glimpse, a ghost of a phantom of a specter of an image.

Yellow-orange fills Sans' vision. Alphys. What's she doing? Can't she see he's trying to rest? She's really close, and he _thinks_ his ribcage's moving? He can hardly feel his body at this point. He might as well be a skull and nothing else. Heh, just like Paps sometimes. Hahaha. It's funny in a really tragic way. He's even wearing his brother's dust on the ragged orange scarf around his neck. He wonders vaguely if he's dying. It'd make sense, what with the numbness and the blurred vis-

The skeleton suddenly gasps like a drowning man.

His soul nestles back into him and life flows through his bones again, color comes back to his sight, his other senses kick back into gear and he has to choke back a scream, his body curls up automatically.

"Sans! Oh my god, please talk to me! Y-you almost died!"

He's shaking, he can barely breathe with the vest around him, but the thing falls away almost as soon as the thought crosses his mind. It's Alphys again, she's still moving about, she just unbuckled the straps across his back. She must've managed to deactivate it then. He's lucky she didn't try pulling it off him first. Sans feels the telltale warmth of healing magic start to spread throughout his frame, and sees the green glow of it filtering into his closed socket.

"Sans? C-can you hear me?"

The skeleton rubs a hand over his face, feeling sweat beading on his skull. Ugh. That could've gone better. He doesn't remember that happening so fast on any of the subjects the Displacer was tested on, and he's certain none of them ever got to the point of dying. They'd just go into a coma.

Then again, none of them had a soul held together with spit. Oh, look, he's even lost a little bit of dust, his sweat's all gritty. Isn't that just _great_?

"yeah. thanks, alph," he manages to say, even if his voice is still rather uneven. She breathes a sigh of relief. "can you help me up?" Sans' bones feel like they've been turning into rubber. He hopes the feeling will go away soon.

"Yeah, o-of course. Are you a-alright?"

It's not hard to get him to his feet. He's just bones, after all. No flesh to give him weight. He sways a little when Alphys lets go and has to steady himself on the wall. "same as ever." Which is to say, feeling like shit. Christ, he's going to have nightmares about that now. He wonders if that's what it feels like to drown. Skeleton's don't _need_ to breathe, it's just a psychological thing for them.

The lizard is still worried, but she doesn't pursue this particular matter further. Sans can tell she has a million other questions running through her mind. "U-um, okay," she starts when he turns to the pile of his discarded clothes. "So, w-what was that b-black mark on your soul?"

Sans just tugs the hoodie back on. It looks abnormally deflated without all the other layers under it. The rest of the stuff, the sweaters and his shirt and everything else, he drops through a shortcut into his room for later. "long story," he says. "it's the same stuff that the second soul has though," he adds with a nod to the terminal, where his soul readout has joined the other two from Frisk's shining red heart.

Alphys frowns at the screen. "This doesn't make a-any sense. First we get t-two signatures from the same s-soul, then the second one is all w-weird, and now y-your soul is... weird too." She glares at him, like she's accusing him of messing with her. "You're n-not telling me something."

Heh. Understatement of the century. "not anything to do with this, alph, i promise. i'm just as much in the dark as you. but..." He pads over to the terminal, where one of the windows is still waiting input on the name of the new Trait. "...call it an educated guess."

He taps a few keys.

TRAIT ALIGNMENT COMPLETE  
|||||||||||||||||||||||100%|||||||||||||||||||||||  
PRELIMINARY DESIGNATION- **VOID (VD)**

PROCEED WITH EXTRACTION?  
[Y]          [N]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gaster's backstory, his relationship with the bone bros, and all the stuff that went down before he was erased is something I'm hoping to explore on a separate project, either a future fic or a comic or possibly even an askblog! Sooo... all you're getting here is these little breadcrumbs, sorry.


	14. Unreality Extract

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we'll be flipping between Sans and Alphys for a couple chapters while they work things out. I already know the next chapter will be from Sans' point of view. Not sure when/if I'll get back to the other characters, but we'll see.
> 
> Also, I actually have chapter 15 all written out and drafted already! So next week's update is guaranteed.  
> I can't wait to post it :3c

Alphys still can't believe she let Sans talk her into this.

Hell, she still can't believe he almost **_died!_ ** What was he even _thinking?!_ Using that... _Displacer_ thing she's never even heard of! God, this whole thing just... she doesn't even have the words for it. It sucks. She feels like she's all the way back with the DT experiments, floundering with no idea on what she's doing and just hoping with all her soul that everything works out.

And yet...

Alphys claws at her forehead.

This is a bad idea. It's so very bad. Why did she agree?!

After she'd stabilized Sans, and he'd decided to name the new trait after the Void for whatever reason, he'd obviously given no clear explanation as to why he'd done that. Why would he?! Hah! It's already some kind of miracle he's told her as much as he has these past few days! But either way, he did it, and before she knew it they had a vial labeled 'VD Extract' in their hands. The material inside wasn't bright red, but black, darker than the darkest pit in Waterfall, a black that consumes all light that falls upon it. There's still about half of the original amount left, but the rest has been separated and diluted for the upcoming experiments.

It's been a few hours. They did the extraction before lunch, and now it's about late afternoon. After arguing, extensively, with the skeleton over it, she'd finally given in and admitted that, yes, they had to find out what the extract did somehow, and they had no other option but to use live subjects. So she'd put out a request on the Undernet for volunteers at Sans' request.

To her surprise, some monsters responded.

She's alone in the patient room, with the stretchers. She's been cleaning them up for the past couple minutes. Sans said something about 'getting ready' and hasn't returned since (of _course_ he wouldn't help with the cleaning, why did she even except as much?). The vial of raw VD Extract is in a pocket of her lab coat. She can feel the edges of the little cylindre pressing into her thigh every time she moves. There's a little wheeled cart next to her with a tray on top, bearing seven needles and two vials: diluted VD Extract, roiling and swirling behind the glass like black mist; then a tiny amount of raw Extract, just enough for a single dose, a minute sphere of condensed smoke.

The lizard doesn't even jump when the shortcut opens next to her.

Sans is back. He's ditched his layers of clothing, even his trademark blue hoodie, for his old lab coat. It has 'sans' written across the breast pocket in black marker instead of a proper ID card. He even has a pen and clipboard! The dusty orange scarf is still around his neck though. Alphys doubts he's ever going to take the thing off at this point.

Alphys shakes her head. No, _focus._ You're here to get results. Forget everything else. This is for the good of everyone! Plus, this VD stuff can't be as bad as DT, right? The monsters should be fine.

"So, a-are you done?"

"yep. all good to go," he says. The pen scratches across the paper, making a single line of text. "so, what're we working with?"

The lizard fidgets with her lab coat, then counts on her fingers. "Well, I-I had five monsters that v-volunteered for the experiment. They're w-waiting in the Lab. It's, uh... a l-loox, two woshua t-twins, then a vulkin a-and a f-final froggit." She points at the tray holding the needles and vials of extract. "S-since we have two really s-similar monsters, one of the w-woshuas gets the raw extract, a-and everyone else gets the d-diluted version. ...Oh, a-and I grabbed a g-golden flower and an echo f-flower from Waterfall. Th-they're getting injected with the r-raw extract too."

Sans is nodding along, scribbling on his clipboard. "sounds good," he says in the end. "who's first?"

Alphys shrugs a little. "I-I don't think it really m-matters. I'm just g-going to call them i-in the same order they a-arrived in. S-so, it's going to be the v-vulkin first, the final f-froggit second, the woshuas t-together on third, the l-loox on fourth, and the two f-flowers last."

The skeleton scrawls out a few more lines. "alright. i'll just let you work then." He retreats to a shadowed corner, where he can watch without being too visible. "someone's gotta take notes, right?"

Ugh, why does he have to make jokes at a time like this? But he's right, of course, she'll be handling the patients. She won't have time to write down the results. It has to be a joint effort, otherwise it'll never work. Alphys just mumbles something about bringing the first volunteer down before walking out the door.

God, she's still just so insecure about this. It feels like she's letting herself get talked into taking part in a crime or something. But Sans seems so sure of it, and the points he made _are_ solid, she can't deny that. This is the strongest lead they have toward figuring out what's wrong with the seventh soul. They _have_ to follow it. If they can figure out that this new soul trait does...

Well, she's not sure about the next step after that. But that second signature on the seventh soul is nothing but DT and this VD stuff. They might be able to figure out why the second signature is there or something. Souls aren't supposed to have two signatures.

Alphys escorts the vulkin down silently. The thing follows her morosely, their magma bubbling slow, their heat faded. They need help getting up on the stretcher, but Sans' blue magic solves that issue quickly. And then the monster just sits there, quiet, their short legs tucked in under them.

 _For the good of everyone_ , Alphys reminds herself when she picks up the first needle and fills it with diluted VD Extract.

"O-okay. So, u-um... y-you don't have to do anything s-special, alright? W-we just need you to s-summon your soul, so I-I can inject this i-into it, okay?"

The vulkin doesn't even look at the needle. They just close their eyes. A breath laced with smoke rises from their mouth, white, shining smoke that coils into a glowing, upside-down heart above their gurgling crater.

Alphys cradles the little soul with shaking fingers. It's almost too hot to the touch and has the consistency of hard silicone, solid and weighty but with a bit of give. "W-we don't know the e-effect that the VD Extract i-is going to have on y-you. That's the m-main reason we need your help, s-so, uh... o-once it's done, we n-need you to tell us what y-you feel, alright?"

The vulkin nods with a delay. "Does my best..." they mutter.

The lizard manages a small, encouraging smile. "Th-thanks. I-I'm going to inject it now, o-okay?"

There's no response.

She positions the needle on the very center of the glowing heart. A calculated push, and it pierces the white. The vulkin winces and whines under their breath. Alphys' claw sinks the plunger forward. Like a drop of ink in water, the black smoke blossoms inside the soul in wispy ribbons.

For a few moments it just hangs there, unmoving, even after Alphys puts the used needle away. The vulkin's expression doesn't change however. Their face only scrunches up further when the black starts to spread and thicken, overpowering the white completely. The soul becomes a dark heart, and suddenly, the magma bubbling in the monster's crater shifts. The vulkin begins to shake more and more with every passing second as their heat is sapped completely and icy-cold black sludge spills from their crater, so cold it gathers a layer of condensation almost immediately.

Sans' pen scratching across his clipboard in the corner is incredibly distracting.

The soul, thankfully, returns to its usual white after a few seconds, but the oily fluid remains, dribbling slowly down the vulkin's sides in large dollops. When Alphys tries to put a consoling hand on the monster she has to take it away almost immediately. The chill is so intense it stings.

"C-cold...! T-too... c-c-cold! Ahh!" the vulkin whimpers, covering their face so the oil doesn't get to their eyes.

Alphys is about to call out to them when Sans interjects. "what's their soul like now?"

She frowns at him, but complies anyway. "I-it's colder than ice," she says without even having to touch it. It has a chill mist around it now, it's not hard to tell. But she leaves Sans to his notes to focus on the vulkin, who by now has started to cry, their little hiccups making the dark sludge in their crater bubble and froth like hot wax. "Hey, i-it's okay. I-I'll take you someplace warm, o-okay? Are you feeling a-anything else?"

The vulkin's shaking so hard now she's not even sure they're saying 'no' with their face or not, but Alphys doesn't have the heart to keep them here any longer. The underground isn't exactly cozy. She starts to wheel them along atop the stretcher, offering soothing words the whole way that she's pretty sure fall on deaf ears, but they make her feel slightly better about the whole thing at least.

For the good of everyone.

Before long, they're in the room with the backup generator, the one that powers the elevator to New Home. It's not the best option, but Alphys doesn't want the other volunteers to wait too long, either. "Y-you can stay here for now. There's p-plenty of heat under the generator."

As soon as the word 'heat' is out of her mouth the vulkin practically leaps off the cot, hits the floor with a nasty thud, and squeezes themself into the tiny gap underneath the machine, shaking the whole way and leaving behind a trail of black smears.

Alphys can hear them muttering 'so cold' to themself, but they should warm up soon. Hopefully.

She'll check back on them once they're done.

For now, Alphys tows the stretcher back to the patient room, replaces the sheets on it, and calls down the next volunteer, the final froggit. This one seems marginally less depressed, they hop up onto the stretcher on their own accord and even croak and nod in acknowledgement while Alphys explains the procedure. The frog-like monsters seems a bit concerned at the prospect of having needles in their soul, but they comply nonetheless, letting the glowing heart form in front of their chest.

Like before, Alphys holds the soul in her hand and administers the same dose of diluted VD Extract. This one is slightly chilly and actually has a very faint sort of dampness to its surface.

This time, the black spreads across the soul as soon as it's out of the needle and dilutes further, turning the heart gray instead of black. The final froggit gurgles under its breath. Their spine curls forward and they start to shake, but it's not from cold. Their soul shifts back to white, just as their body begins to do the opposite. The black of their belly leeches into the white of their sides and back, slowly, hazily, the spines across their body seem to shrink into the flesh, like a candle burning out. All of a sudden, the final froggit looks more like a regular froggit, but with their colors flipped, white belly on a black body.

The shaking stops, thankfully. They don't look like they're in pain. Alphys puts a hand on the final froggit's side. "Hey, a-are you alright?"

The monster turns white, flat eyes to her, silent, unmoving.

"Um. H-how do you feel?"

Nothing.

Sans' pen is scribbling away.

Alphys isn't sure what to do, but... one of the levels above them has a few observation rooms. She can leave them in one of them for now, she needs to get to the other volunteers. "Y-you're going to have to s-stay here for observation, alright?" she says, despite the lack of reaction. It makes her feel better.

It's a short elevator trip to an upper level of the underground complex. The final froggit stays silent and motionless the whole way, only swaying with the rattling of the cot it's perched on, which Alphys leaves inside a blank, featureless room with only one way in or out. She locks the door and makes sure to activate the surveillance camera before returning to the patient room.

There's a feeling of dread clogging the pit of her stomach.

Only three more monsters to go. She can do this.

For the good of everyone, right?

The woshua twins, she brings down together. They each take one of the two remaining stretchers, though they insist that she push them close. One of them protests more, they refuse to show their soul at first, but the other reassures them, and in unison the two monsters form their radiant hearts above the suds.

Alphys more feels than hears Sans come up to her side. It gives her chills. "better to do these two at the same time, yeah?" he offers.

She hesitates, but nods. "Y-yeah, probably. You c-can inject the raw extract." She hands him a needle and the vial holding the little ball of tar. They mimic each other, pulling the right doses out of each vial, taking each heart shape in one hand, and injecting the black with the other. The woshuas' souls are cool and slippery, like matching bars of soap.

As soon as the used needle is out of his hand, Sans goes right back to jotting down notes.

Both monsters shudder and squeeze their eyes shut. Both souls turn black, but the one that received the diluted dose becomes pockmarked with white spots, as though trying to rid itself of the contamination. The frothy water of the siblings turns dark, bubbling slowly, thickly, releasing puffs of black gas with each bubble that pops. The woshua of the raw extract, however, goes beyond that. Their whole body becomes darker shades, lime green turning into dark, smoky jade, bright blue into deep cobalt, and their liquid starts to rise and overflow, frothing and smoking, a dark, viscous oil that sticks to everything it touches.

The first woshua seems relatively normal, aside from the dark froth in their bucket-like body. They're a bit disoriented, but they still look at their sibling with concern. "Wosh?" they call out.

The response is a glare that comes from pitch-black eyes. No recognition. No sign of higher thinking. The creature just sways on the spot with such force that a splash of its oily emission flies off and covers the other, soul and everything, Alphys has to jump back to avoid the stuff.

"No! Wosh! Wosh self! Dirty! Filth- gck!" The other monster protests and chokes on the oil. The black sludge soaks into their body, their soul, darkening both, turning the two siblings indistinguishable from one another, and in unison they turn to the closest monster in sight, which just so happens to be Alphys, crap!

The splashes of oil land on her labcoat, not her skin, thankfully, but she hurries to take it off and scramble away from the pair, until the two woshuas are suddenly lifted with blue magic and dropped through a single, wide, shortcut.

Alphys is bracing herself on the wall.

What...

She looks down at her discarded labcoat. It's been turned completely black.

"you got the cells back online, right?" Sans asks from the corner.

Alphys nods slowly, without even realizing it, before she shakes herself back into the present. "Y-yeah, I..." She runs a hand across the fleshy crown of spines atop her skull. "Y-you didn't put them with the f-froggit, did you?"

"nah. separate cell, but they're together."

She nods again, looking around. God, this is turning into such a mess, both literally and figuratively. They don't even have another stretcher for the last patient to sit on, the two that the woshuas used are covered in that black sludge. And now she even needs a new lab coat!

She's still a bit apprehensive about touching the dirty one, to be honest. They can finish this elsewhere.

"Sans, c-can you make a... sh-shortcut to my room?"

He gives her a weird look that she can't decipher. "sure."

The crack opens right next to him and he holds out a hand for her to take, but he doesn't go through himself. He just pokes his arm out the other side when she crosses over. A quick trip to her wardrobe gives her a fresh lab coat, and Alphys is back underground in no time at all.

"Thanks. So, I-I think we can do the loox i-in the bunk room, a-and use one of the beds there?"

"yeah," the skeleton says simply.

She grabs the last needle and the vial with the last dose of diluted extratc and puts both in her pocket. While Sans heads to the bunk room, she brings down the last volunteer, the loox from Snowdin Town. This one actually chatters excitedly at her about how they want to help the Underground in any way they can, but there's an air of overcompensation to the words that's impossible to miss. They look worried for just a fraction of a second when Alphys asks to see their soul, then promptly let it take shape, even going so far as to push it into her hands.

It somehow makes her feel even worse about the injection, but she goes through with it anyway.

This time, instead of spreading outward, the black stays concentrated in a small circle at the core of the soul. The loox grits their teeth and squeezes their eye shut, but there's no visible physical change. "I-it... _hurts_..." They hug themself, hands clutching tight at their upper arms. "I feel... weak..."

Alphys lays a sympathetic hand on their shoulder.

The loox turns to look at her, just barely peeking through their eyelids, but then their eye flies open and they flinch away with a shout.

"W-what's wrong?"

Her words fall on deaf ears. The monster is looking everywhere but at her, eye moving wildly before squeezing shut again. "No, stop, it's too much! I don't want to see! I CAN'T STOP SEEING! _MAKE IT_ **_STOP!!!_ ** " They scream as their hands start to claw at their single eye!

"W-wait, don't-!"

Alphys herself yelps when a bouquet of bones suddenly erupts from the mattress and spears through the loox. It gives one final choked scream, a spasm, then crumbles into black dust.

Sans goes back to his note-taking as though nothing happened.

_What the fuck?!_

"Sans!"

He looks up from the clipboard with the same blank expression he's worn this whole time.

Alphys just gestures to the dusty bed, utterly speechless.

His sockets follow her arm and scan the pile of coal dust, briefly. "what?"

" _W-what?!_ Sans, you just-! H-how could you?!"

"they asked for it, didn't they?"

Alphys' jaw moves wordlessly a few times. "You can't just k- _kill_ monsters like that! A-are you crazy?!"

"and letting them claw themself to death would've been better, is that it?"

Again, Alphys is speechless for a few seconds. "I-I..." She clutches at her head. "God, w-why did I let you t-talk me into this?!" Her eyes go to the pile of dust again, dark like the VD Extract, absorbing the light that falls upon it rather than reflecting it. Her only consolation is that all the volunteers had no family left, she'd made a point to ask for monster that wouldn't be missed for this exact reason.

"we still got the flowers to go," the skeleton says.

"NO!"

She actually shouted the word. Alphys can feel her electricity magic crackling across her scales, sparking off her claws and the crown of spines on her head. "I n-never should've agreed to this! If you w-want to have dust on your hands, then f-fine! But I'm n-not going to be responsible for even m-more suffering!"

And then she storms out without a second thought, tears welling up in her eyes before she's even out of the room.


	15. Talking Flower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy howdy I sure like exposition dumps, don't I?  
> Hopefully the text isn't too annoying to read on this chapter, but I can come up with something else if it is.  
> Also, do note the change in the character tags.

_entry number 18 (figured i might as well follow the doc's old numbering system)_  
_experiment- vd injections_  
_subject list- vulkin, final froggit, 2 woshuas (twins), loox, golden flower, echo flower._  
  
                _injection #1- vulkin, standard dose of diluted extract._  
                _subject displays a reaction of pain to the needle, then begins to shake. subject's soul becomes black along with its lava,_  
                _the later of which becoming cold enough to gather condensation. subject's soul returns to white. subject complains_  
 _about the cold and is relocated to the backup generator room. said generator is later found nonfunctional and encased_  
 _in ice. subject's dust is found embedded in the ice and appears to have been the source of the freezing. the generator_  
 _has since been returned to normal activity._  
  
                _injection #2- final froggit, standard dose of diluted extract._  
                _subject's display of pain is stronger. subject's soul becomes an even gray, then returns to white. subject appears t_ _o_  
                _shake from pain as its form changes. its skin colors become flipped and the spiky growths across its body shrink into_  
 _nothing. subject's eyes are white and possibly blind. it displays no response to outside stimulus. relocated to a_  
 _containment room, where the dust was later found. surveillance footage reveals the subject jumped off the cot at the_  
 _exact angle to break its own neck upon hitting the floor._  
  
                _injections #3 & 4- woshuas, standard doses of diluted (#1) and raw (#2) extract._  
                _both subjects display the expected reaction of pain. both souls turn black, but #1's gains several white spots across_  
                _its surface. subject #2's body acquires darker shades and begins to produce a tar-like substance that bubbles with_  
 _noxious gas. subject #1 attempts to call out to #2, who responds by contaminating #1. subject #1's soul becomes_  
 _fully black again, and it's behavior equal to #2's. both are relocated to a containment room. later examination revealed_  
 _that every surface within the cell was covered in the oily secretion, among which the dust of both subjects could be_  
 _found. surveillance footage shows the pair working together to spread their secretion, then turning on each other._  
  
                _injection #5- loox, standard dose of diluted extract._  
                _expected reaction of pain. injected extract remains clumped together inside the soul rather than spreading. no physical_  
                _change. subject claims to feel pain and weakness. subject becomes startled when attempting to look around and_  
 _appears to be suffering from visual hallucinations, given its unspecified claims of 'seeing too much'. subject attempts_  
 _to blind itself and is terminated._  
  
                               _*later analysis of the black dust yielded no extraordinary properties_  
  
                _injection #6- golden flower, standard dose of_ _raw_ _extract._  
                _extract is administered into the stem. no apparent change. subject placed under camera observation._  
  
                _injection #7- echo flower, standard dose of_ _raw_ _extract._  
                _extract is again administered into the stem. spread is visible as black veins across the surface of the subject. when it_  
 _reaches the petals, subject ceases to respond to outside stimulus and begins emitting unintelligible sounds from an_  
 _unknown source. subject placed within a noise-canceling chamber hooked to a software capable of unscrambling_  
 _audio input for further analysis._

Sans sets his notes aside and rubs a hand over his face.

It's late. He doesn't know what time it is, but he doesn't need to. Alphys left, he doesn't know where she's gone off to, but she hasn't been back, he's kept an eye on what few surveillance cameras are still functional down here in the old labs. He didn't bother cleaning up the mess in the patient room, the cell taken over by oil, the bed covered in black dust. He just collected samples to test, and the results hadn't taken long to get at all.

No, what Sans has been cracking his skull over is the entry, written by his own hand. It's the loox and the Echo Flower that interest him most. The others just got changed in strange, barely-predictable ways, but the loox...

What did it see? He'd give his left arm to know.

Sans' reports, as he calls them, come in the shape of both visual and auditory stimulus, which he had to learn how to control so they didn't overpower the reality he was actually in. It was a mess, in the beginning. He'd look at something and see images overlaid across his vision, fighting for clarity, a jumble of movement and color and _noise_ that would invariably give him a migraine within seconds.

Did the loox hear things as well?

Sans clacks the butt end of the pen against his teeth, sockets on the paper covered in his handwriting, but he's not really seeing it.

If only he could repeat the experiment. Five subjects are hardly enough data to analyze. Two of them yielded almost equal results even!

...Well, no, that's not quite right.

There's the flowers too. But the Echo Flower is the most important of the two.

The skeleton's sockets scan the desk in front of him, _his_ old workspace. He has his feet propped up on the edge. One end is taken up by a few different screens, all sort of piled together precariously, each showing a simultaneous feed from a handful of security cameras. The other end has the Echo Flower, locked away inside a two-layered plexiglass box, with a microphone built into one of the sides. The microphone feeds into his computer, the centerpiece of the entire messy ensemble, where the scrambled noises from the flower are being deciphered. The progress bar on the screen is almost full; there's a whole list of frequencies waiting to be listened to behind it.

It took quite a while to set up this mess in Sans' old office, but here he is now. The empty half of the space was a good area to leave all the cables and connections he had to jury-rig to get everything working. The floor on his side is still littered with detritus, though Sans at least had the decency to push it all up against the wall, so it wouldn't get caught in the electrical cables while he was setting things up.

A long, exhausted sigh drains out of his as his head tips back and he stares at the ceiling.

The VD Extract is so goddamn _infuriating_ . He _knows_ he named it right, he's sure of it, but... ugh, how does it even work?! It's literally nothingness made into a physical thing, something that can interact with reality in observable, measureable ways, which already sounds like bullshit. It made the vulkin turn cold, the woshuas turn into filth-spreading machines, the final froggit kill itself for some reason?! And the loox...

_What did the loox see?!_

Was it reports, glimpses of other timelines, the same way Sans had them in the beginning? Maddening, impossible to understand? There's no way he can be sure of it, that's what annoys him the most.

Sans groans and rubs his knuckles over his eyes. He hunches forward, grabs his empty mug again, holds it through a small shortcut and refills it with the jug of coffee from his kitchen all the way back in Snowdin Town. It's gone cold by now, but he doesn't care.

The computer, _finally_ , beeps. He can scroll through the list of deciphered frequencies now.

Sans gulps down a few mouthfuls of cold coffee, rubs his face again, sets his slippers back on the floor, and rolls the chair forward.

Most of the channels show similar results. Snatches of sounds, too brief to make anything understandable. A half-formed word from a familiar voice, something that sounds like running water, dripping fluid echoed in an empty room, brief snatches of conversation, messy and jumbled.

The similarity to the auditory half of his reports in impossible to miss.

Sans actually feels something akin to excitement.

Along the way though, he finds something else. A few scattered frequencies in the sequence don't follow the pattern. After a while he tugs his clipboard over and grabs the pen again.

                _addendum to injection #7_  
_the audio unscrambling was successful. result is 71 identifiable frequencies among an estimated total of hundreds._  
_most seem to constitute noise sourced from other timelines, each sampling too brief to make any degree of sense._  
_seven frequencies, however, display different results:_  
_#17- subtle static and nothing else_  
_#23- entry number 5, nearly inaudible but otherwise unchanged_  
_#37- entry number 15, voice is warped and unrecognizable but speech is oddly clear_  
_#43- entry number 11, plays like a heavily-corrupted audio file_  
_#59- tortured screams from an unknown voice; frequency has been permanently muted_  
_#67- entry number 9, difficult to understand due to the voice having been doubled and layered over itself  
               #71- loud static with frequent glitching, no voices detected_

Sans leans back and taps the pen on his teeth again.

He never _could_ find Gaster's recorded entries after the incident, could he? It'd make sense that they ended up in the Void with him. And since this is just the intelligible portion of the frequencies, and not all entries were made as audio, it's only natural that Sans wouldn't find them all here.

The screaming he can only hope is coming from some other timeline that's worse than his because Sans is **_not_ ** listening to it again. It's too... _clear_ to be from a timeline though, he can't deny it. Maybe it's actually coming from the Void itself? Or, more accurately, from someone _in_ the Void. And there's only one option for who said someone could possibly be.

A shudder rattles his bones. The thought of Gaster making those sounds gives him chills.

Sans shakes his head and pushes the matter aside for now. The last channel on the list is strange, but not very useful. Just glitched static, louder than almost all the other channels. He can't make out anything special in the noise.

And then there's frequency number 17. It's extremely quiet. The closest comparison Sans can think of is when a vinyl disc without any music in it is placed under the needle, and the only sound comes from what few microscopic imperfections are on the material. Soft, occasional crackling.

Why did the computer think this lack of sound warranted its own freq-

" **hEllO, sAns.** "

...

What.

The _fuck._

Is the flower... _talking_ to him?!

The voice is warped, glitched, echoed, barely understandable, but...

There's a wave of broken static, something that might have been an attempt at a chuckle. " **dOn't yOU knOw hOw tO grEEt An Old frIEnd?** "

It's...

Is it?

It has to be.

" _gaster?_ "

The voice hums, with a noise like putting a microphone too close to its own speaker, a brief, high-pitched electronic whine. " **I thOUght yOU dIdn't lIkE rEfErrIng tO mE by OUr shArEd lAst nAmE?** "

Sans opens his mouth to answer, then closes it again with a shiver. There's a prickle in the back of his neck, like he's being watched. He glances behind him.

Nothing. Just his bookcase, same as ever.

The flower chuckles again through the computer. " **yEs, I Am IndEEd bEhInd yOU. strAngE hOw wE cAn fEEl whEn wE ArE bEIng wAtchEd, Isn't It? EvEn If thE wAtchEr Isn't rEAl.** "

Sans shudders again, but thankfully the vague sense of a presence behind him moves away, passing by the Echo Flower along the way. "i thought you-"

" **_dIEd?_ ** " the voice interjects. " **I wAs ErAsEd, sAns, nOt kIlled. bUt I wOUldn't cAll mysElf AlIvE, nO. I cAnnOt bE AlIvE wIthOUt ExIstIng.** "

The skeleton can't really wrap his head around it, but he brushes it aside. This is already weird enough without him arguing with a decoded voice coming from a flower injected with Void Extract. "you... you're in the void," Sans says. It isn't a question.

" **I Am IndEEd,** " the voice agrees.

Sans still remembers his brief visit to the other side of reality.

Dark. Nothing but empty darkness. Darker than anything could possibly be. Dark, and empty, and boundless. Nothing to guide you, nothing to show which way is up. Falling endlessly without moving, every moment an eternity, an infinity of lifetimes squeezed into seconds. It wasn't cold. For something to be cold, it has to have mass. The Void was just... hollow.

He doesn't like to think about it if he can avoid it.

"...how are you still sane?"

A few seconds of silence. Then...

" **thErE Is A rEAsOn frEqUEncy nUmbEr 59 Is fIllEd wIth scrEAmIng.** "

Sans stares at the number with a knot in the stomach he doesn't have.

...Wait, why's he feeling sorry for Gaster? They were colleagues in the Lab, at the most. Sure, the guy took care of him and Paps when they were little, but he never enjoyed it. Sans had to do most of the work.

And yet he still tried to understand what happened after...

...

The not-presence swings around the other side of his desk and come close again, but he doesn't cringe away this time.

" **sAns. thE flOwEr Is wIltIng. It sEEms As thOUgh It cAnnOt Act As A vEssEl fOr my vOIcE fOrEvEr.** "

Oh. Crap, he's right. The disc of the Echo Flower is drooping, the petals are becoming rumpled. And the black seems to have spread further? The black veins are more branched out, more plentiful than before.

" **I cAnnOt wAstE thIs OppOrtUnIty, sAns, nOw thAt I cAn spEAk wIth yOU AgAIn.** "

Sans' brow furrows. "whaddya mean?"

The next words seem... desperate? " **I mEAn thAt I Am** **_sOrry_ ** **, sAns. fOr EvErythIng yOU And yOUr brOthEr hAd tO tOlErAtE UndEr my lAcklUstEr cArE. I Am sOrry fOr hAvIng trEAtEd yOU lIkE An OccUpAtIOn, fOr nOt gIvIng yOU thE lOvE yOU dEsErvEd, thE fAmIly yOU lOst. I UsEd tO blAmE AsgOrE fOr fOIstIng mE wIth yOU whEn I wAs sO bUsy In my rOlE As thE rOyAl scIEntIst.** "

The voice laughs bitterly. " **sUch** **_lIEs_ ** **. I hAd cOnstructEd A vAst, ElAbOrAtE fAllAcy tO bAck Up my UttErly UnEthIcAl ExpErImEnts. It wAs All fOr thE gOOd Of EvEryOnE! It wOUld All pAy Off In thE End, OncE wE hAd rEclAImEd OUr frEEdOm! thErE wAs nO OthEr wAy, OthErwIsE I wOUldn't hAvE bEEn fOrcEd tO cOErcE and kIdnAp InnOcEnt mOnstErs tO bEcOmE my sUbjEcts. And sO On, Ad InfInItUm.** "

A static-filled sigh drips from the speakers. " **I Am IrrEdEEmAblE. bUt... my wOrst sIn wAs lEttIng yOU jOIn mE, sAns. whEn yOU cAUght mE, I wAs sO rElIEvEd thAt yOU shOwEd IntErEst InstEAd Of dIsgUst thAt I nEvEr, fOr EvEn A sEcOnd, cOnsIdErEd hOw UnhEAlthy thAt wAs. I wAs AmAzEd, EvEn! cOUntlEss gEnErAtIOns bEtwEEn Us, And yEt OUr sOUls wErE sO vEry sImIlAr! EvEry tImE I prOpOsEd A nEw ExpErImEnt tO yOU, Or shOwEd yOU An OldEr rEsUlt, All I hAd tO dO wAs ExplAIn my Own, dEEply-flAwEd lOgIc And yOU wOUld fOllOw my lEAd UnqUEstIOnIngly.** "

Sans can almost hear the head shake. " **yOU cOUld sEE my ErAsUrE As rIghtfUl pUnIshmEnt fOr my sIns. I mysElf hAvE AccEptEd It As sUch. I wAs thE wOrst InflUEncE yOU cOUld hAvE pOssIbly hAd, sAns, And I Am** **_sOrry_ ** **, frOm thE bOttOm Of thIs mEAgEr cOnstrUct I cAll A sOUl. And I mUst UrgE yOU tO tUrn yOUr AttEntIOn bAck tO thE hUmAn's sOUl.** "

That rattles Sans out of his dumbfounded disbelief. " _what?_ whaddya think im doing here, having a _picnic?_ "

" **sAns,** **_plEAsE_ ** **. wE bOth knOw yOU dId nOt nEEd tO dO All thIs tO fIgUrE OUt thAt thErE ArE twO hUmAn sOUls fUsEd tOgEthEr In thAt pOd. thE InItIAl rEAdIng tOld yOU As mUch. yOU ArE prOjEctIng yOUr Own prOblEms IntO yOUr wOrk, And whIlE I cAnnOt blAmE yOU fOr wAntIng tO UndErstAnd thE InnEr wOrkIngs Of yOUr Own dAmAgEd sOUl, yOU cAnnOt cOntInUE hIdIng bEhInd thE fAçAde Of 'hElpIng thE UndErgrOUnd'.** "

 

...

 

Sans is silent.

His sockets flicker to the Echo Flower again. It's sagged even more, the cyan is being overtaken by the black. He realizes the feed from the microphone has faded, the volume's become lower.

" **It sEEms I dO nOt hAvE mUch tImE lEft. I cAnnOt EvEr cOmpEnsAte fOr my pAst mIsdEEds, bUt I cAn At lEAst OffEr yOu whAt lIttlE hElp I'm AblE tO gIvE thrOUgh thIs lImItEd mEdIUm.** "

The skeleton has to take a moment to gather his thoughts. That was a lot to take in. But something sticks out in Sans' mind. "it can't be another human. all the other human souls are contained."

" **yOU ArE fOrgEttIng yOUr hIstOry, sAns. thErE wAs OncE A hUmAn In thE UndErgrOUnd whOsE sOUl wAs nEvEr fOUnd AftEr thEIr pAssIng.** "

"who..."

... _Oh_.

"you mean... the king's kid? _they're_ responsible for all this?"

" **thAt Is whAt thE EvIdEnce pOInts tO, AlthOUgh I hEsItAtE tO sAy hOw InvOlvEd thEy mAy Or mAy nOt hAvE bEEn In thE kIllIng. thEIr cOmpAny wAs AlwAys wElcOme tO mE hErE. bUt yEs, It Is chArA's sOUL thAt Is nEstEd InsIde thE hUmAn's. If yOU cAn fIgUrE OUt A wAy tO sEpArAtE thEm, AsgOrE wIll bE AblE tO UsE frIsk's sOUl wIthOUt trOUblE.** "

The Echo Flower is barely holding itself upright. It only has a few scattered specks of cyan left across its surface. The audio feed is so faded the skeleton can barely make out anything at all.

" **I wIsh yOU lUck, sAns. It wAs nIcE, tAlkIng tO yOU AgAIn. fArEwEll.** "

The flower gives out under its own weight and its stem snaps in two. It's dry, wilted, completely black now.

Sans runs a hand over his skull.

That had to have been the _weirdest_ conversation he's ever had.


	16. Making Amends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah what this fic isn't dead??? Who'd've thought, huh?
> 
> So yeah, really sorry about the massiva gap between this chapter and the last, but I'd just sorta hit a bit of a block here. This chapter gave me so much trouble to write it's not even funny, so it's shorter, and I'm only now getting back into the groove of the fic. Can't promise updates will resume at a decent pace yet, I'm winding down to the end of the semester at college, which as you can expect means a lotta work to be done, but I'll try my best to not have like, what? Two months between this and the next part? We'll see.  
> Also, I think we might be drawing kinda close to the end? If it all goes to plan anyway. You'll just have to wait and see~

It's been quite a while since the last time Alphys was home.

In the rush to get as far away from the Lab as possible, with emotions running high and her vision marred with tears, she'd barely seen where she was going. Alphys had hurried to the boat ferry and blurted out the first thing that came to mind, and somehow she'd eventually ended up in the garbage dump, on that very same spot where she'd once met Undyne so very long ago. The noise of water cascading behind her was the same as ever. She could've almost pretended things hadn't changed.

Bratty and Catty had found her, luckily. Her old friends. In their own special way they calmed her down, talked her off the edge, lured Alphys into a hug and whisked her away. Another boat ride later and she'd arrived in Snowdin Town, and despite her protests, she was practically dragged through the snow all the way to her mother's house.

The two girls had spent the majority of the evening with her, making sure she had a good time, cheering her up, even watching anime with her on the computer that was still in her old room. The two hadn't known the plot at all, but they still had fun with it. Alphys went to bed actually feeling pretty good, all things considered.

Sleep was less kind to her. Nightmares. Just like when she'd first created the amalgamates, except now there was a whole new set of terrible decisions and uncertainty to draw from. She woke up in the middle of the night, shaking and sweating, even a bit queasy, and never went back to sleep until she heard her mother outside her room, going about the house with the usual morning routine.

The day was a far more subdued affair than the previous. There was a lot of talking, a lot of catching up. A lot of apologizing and reassuring. Alphys even found herself consoling her little brother at one point; he'd been blaming himself for Undyne's death. Alphys wasn't really sure how well she'd managed to comfort him, but Vernie had thanked her in the end and agreed to go out for a walk through Snowdin Town, to help her get reacquainted with the locals.

Alphys got to see how two of the amalgamates were doing. The Canine Unit had been put on vacation until further notice, so they could always be found somewhere in town, clustered together with Endogeny, chatting in their own language of barks and yips and other such dog noises. Meanwhile, Snowy's reunited family had moved out of Ice Village at the request of his mother and taken a permanent residence at the bunny family's home. Their father was part of the amalmagate, after all, and while Snowy's mother was the main personality on display the memories of the other monsters were still there.

It was nice, seeing how effortlessly the amalgams had blended in with the regular monsters. The mere fact that they existed at all still made Alphys anxious, of course, but it had all turned out about as well as it could have, all things considered. Endogeny gurgled happily and pounced her on sight, pinning her to the floor until she'd given it the necessary amount of pets to make it get off. Snowy's mother had muttered a broken 'thank you' to her, echoed by her husband and son, and even the bunny family had come around to welcome her in their home and offer her soothing words. Mistakes had been made, there was no doubt about it, but Alphys had to move past it and look ahead.

There was a conspicuous absence in town throughout the whole day, however.

The house of the skeletal brothers at the end of the road sat dark and silent. Sans was nowhere to be found. Alphys heard from some of the kids in town that his sentry post was empty as well, and if she had to guess she'd wager his other posts were also unoccupied.

Night has come again. Or at least the faint facsimile of it. Alphys is in her room with a video open on her old computer, but she's not looking at it. Sans _has_ to be at the Lab. He was the one pushing for the VD injections. He wouldn't have just left after that, right? She ran off early yesterday, and now it's night again, so she hasn't seen him in almost two whole days. She has no idea what happened to the 'subjects', or what he could possibly be doing if he's not trying to fix the seventh soul.

Alphys wraps her arms across her belly to try and soothe the slight queasiness. Not knowing is the worst part about it. Sans could be doing any number of atrocities down in those old, forgotten tunnels, and she'd be none the wiser. Honestly, after seeing how he'd just up and _murdered_ the VD-injected loox, she wouldn't doubt anything. It feels strangely... familiar? Like she's been through this before. What's that called again, a dejá-vu? Something like th-

There's a prickling at the back of her neck.

Someone's behind her.

"heya."

In that split second after Alphys hears his voice, a whole mess of things bubbles up inside her. He's in her room! What's he been doing?! Why's he here?! It's all his fault!!! Who did he kill this time?! What does he want?! She has to gulp down the metaphorical venom and bile that rise in her throat before she peeks over her shoulder.

Yep, it's Sans, alright. There's no mistaking that lazy drawl of his. That borrowed, oversized lab coat. That dusty, sparkly orange rag around his neck. That-

Wait. He's not smiling. Well, that _has_ been happening pretty often lately, hasn't it? Alphys isn't really surprised. Still, it's just a bit weird, seeing him without his usual grin. She swivels her chair around. "W-what are you doing here?"

"i need your help, alph."

Anger is the first thing that tries to burst out of her. "That's what you s-said about the VD injections."

Sans actually looks at the floor. Out of shame? She can't tell. "yeah, i know." His mouth tugs into a bitter smirk. "kinda boned myself with that, didn't i?" The smile fades and his sockets go back to Alphys. "but this is something else, alph. no one's getting hurt this time, i promise. i need to do something with the extractor, and you're the one who built it. i can't do it on my own."

Alphys looks away. The same words she heard before. He _'can't do it on his own'_. She can't trust him. Not after everything that's happened. Her hands clutch at her upper arms without her even realizing it. "What h-happened to the monsters w-we injected with VD?" she asks without turning around.

"dead."

It's like a knife is jammed through her heart. Alphys squeezes her eyes shut.

A bony hand settles, uncertain, on her shoulder.

She jerks away with an involuntary snarl. She has to remind herself not to shout. "Don't touch me! It's all your fault! You-!" She's pointing at him. "I never wanted to d-do all that! You told me it'd be for the best, th-that it'd help, but it didn't! We just added to the d-death count! A-and now you-!" She claws at her head with a noise of frustration. Alphys can't even find the words.

There's a few seconds of silence.

"...i know."

She glares back up at the skeleton.

"look, alph, i'm sorry. you're right. you didn't need to get involved. i was doing it for my own sake. b-"

"Yes, y-you were! And now you're-!" Alphys can't even express the magnitude of her frustration. "I'm not doing a-anything! You can cover your hands in dust if you w-want, but I'm not hurting anyone else!"

Silence again. Alphys looks away, arms folded, trying not to let the welled-up tears fall.

She hears her bed creak, but refuses to look.

"alph."

Nope, not looking. She huffs audibly.

"isn't it weird, how you had all those blueprints and half-built things, but no name attached to them?"

...

What is he talking about?

"i know who it was behind all that."

Alphys' eyes are drawn to Sans, despite her better judgement. He's talking! He's sitting on the edge of her bed, staring unseeingly at the floor.

"doctor gaster, the royal scientist. we were related, me and him and paps, but he was just a really distant grandpa in more than just the family sense. not really one for kids when i knew him. he used to experiment with the human souls, trying to understand how they worked, using the extracts on monsters to see what happened. said it was supposed to let him find a way to break the barrier." He lets out a mirthless chuckle and looks up at her. "i helped. probably why i wanted to use those monsters yesterday, huh?"

Alphys just watches and listens.

Sans shakes his head and looks away again. "anyway. he didn't just experiment on others. the crazy bastard injected _himself_ with dt, and after that it was just a downward spiral. he started talking about 'save points' and 'resets' and theorizing about timelines and the void and all sorts of nonsense. he thought that he could go back in time or something, if he opened a stable bridge to the void." Another brief, humorless smirk. "he managed the second part, at least."

Alphys' mouth opens, then closes. She wants to ask where Sans is going with this, but she's afraid he'll stop talking if she interrupts.

"his last experiment went to hell. he opened a tear in the fabric of reality that went out of control and he fell into it. i did too, but he threw me back out. i blacked out. paps grabbed me and ran for it while the doc's assistants tried to contain it, and i guess they succeeded, but i never saw them again after that. they were all erased from existence along with the doc. s'why his name's all scrambled on the documents and stuff you found, and why most of the stuff he was responsible for building was either not built or half-finished. everyone else forgot about him."

Sans looks down at his chest. A white glow seeps through his clothes and coalesces into a heart shape, with that dark scar in the middle. "i've had this black thing on my soul since then. turns out it's a piece of the void. it's why i'm so easy to damage, my soul isn't stable because of it. but it's also why i still remember the doc, and..." The heart dissipates into mist and soaks back into his chest. "...it gives me these... glimpses from other timelines. i call them 'reports'. it's just a mess of images and noise, i can't make almost any sense of it. but it's enough to let me see paps and everyone else die over and over again, to know that everything we do here is meaningless. nothing matters. there's infinite timelines with all manner of possibilities coming true, and it the end it's all pointless. just little drops of ink in an endless ocean."

He pauses, then sighs.

"i wanted to confirm this hypothesis, about the void in my soul, with the injections, which i did. i've been living with it for years, but i never had any proof. i couldn't let the opportunity pass." He shakes his head again. "i know i shouldn't have. we're supposed to be trying to fix the seventh soul for asgore to use to free everyone." He looks up at Alphys with something like apologetic hope in his eyes. "i don't have any right to ask you for help after that whole mess, i know. but i swear that this isn't for me. i know what's wrong with the soul. i think i know how to fix it. but i can't do it without you, alph. _please._ "

Alphys is speechless. She can hardly believe her ears. Sans practically told her his life's story! He's usually so cagey! What the hell?! And now he sounds so desperate...

It takes a few tries for her to find her voice again. "I-I... um..." She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. How do you even respond to something like that? "W-well... I... w-what's wrong with the s-soul?"

The skeleton seems relieved. "soul **s** . it's two in one. you remember asgore's kid from way back in the day?"

"A-Asgore's... y-you mean Chara? Wh-"

"yeah, them. they died, but no one ever found their soul, did they?"

Alphys shakes her head.

"turns out it ended up in the void with the doc somehow. he talked to me through the echo flower i injected with vd. told me that they somehow managed to latch on to the human's soul. we just gotta separate them."

The lizard's mouth opens, then closes. She's having a hard time believing all this. "Uh... how are we d-doing that?"

"i think we can if we incorporate the soul displacer into the mechanism of the extractor. that's why i need you, alph. i can't risk doing it wrong and end up breaking something. we've only got one shot at it. better make it count." He hops off the bed and steps close again. "it's the last thing i'll ask from you, alph, and then you can feel free to never think about me again if you want, once we're all outta here and you become a hero."

Alphys averts her eyes again.

God, she really shouldn't trust him, but... after all that, how can she not? This is the most open and honest he's ever been with her. Maybe with anyone at all! She knows for a fact that he even hid stuff from Papyrus. Her claws fiddle with the bottom of her shirt. She kind of wishes he weren't so close.

Alphys squeezes her eyes shut and takes a deep, shaky breath.

"A-alright. I'll h-help. But!" She whips back around to face him. "Y-you're not going to do a-anything without telling me why and w-what it is first! And w-we're not getting anyone else i-involved until we solve this!"

Sans just nods, but now he's smiling again. He seems genuinely relieved. "fair enough. see ya tomorrow at the lab, then?"

"Y-yeah." She sinks back and hugs herself, still hesitant. "See you th-then."

The bony hand comes to her shoulder again, and while she does flinch a little, Alphys doesn't pull away this time. "hey, don't worry alph. i'm sure you can do it. we'll be out in the sun before we know it. and... thanks."

The hand drops, and by the time she looks Sans is gone again.

A long sigh drains out of her. She rubs her hands over her eyes under her glasses, then takes them off and looks at her old computer. Mechanically, Alphys starts to get ready to go to sleep. She closes the video, shuts down the machine, changes into her sleepwear, brushes her teeth, etc. And all the while, her mind is still working, though at a slowing pace.

She's still torn over it. On one hand, Sans basically used her for his own benefit before. But on the other, he did just spill a good bit of his past to her, and his request, while hard to believe, does make _some_ logical sense. She'll just have to keep an eye on him, and everything will be fine, right?

Alphys drifts off to sleep clinging to that thought.

Everything will be fine.


	17. Teamwork

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's just a big wall of dialogue really, not much I can do about that. And more exposition dumps! Maybe someday I'll be able to work this stuff into the narrative without having to rely on a character just word-vomitting all over someone else. But until then, enjoy?

Sans rubs a hand over his sockets.

He couldn't sleep last night. Again. And not for lack of trying, as usual. Reports got way too rowdy. Too much noise inside his own skull. They just do that sometimes, he has no idea why. There's no pattern to it as far as he knows, it's just random. Some days are better, some days are worse. Sometimes he couldn't even get out of bed, there was just too much going on in his head. Papyrus would invariably stay home and make sure he was as comfortable as possible whenever that happened.

The skeleton looks around, but he's not really seeing the Lab around him. Thinking about Papyrus draws his hand out of its pocket to come toy with the dusty scarf around his neck; his other is holding a jug of coffee. He should probably feel worse than this. It's only been... five days? A week? Since it happened? He hasn't really been keeping track. The most he's been getting is glimpses of the sorrow of other Sans-es, from other realities, other tragedies, but he's just... well, not numb. That's not the word. Apathetic, and slightly frustrated, he supposes, over getting stuck with this shitty fucking timeline.

Not like he can do anything about it, though. As always. Just a little skeletal leaf floating down a mighty river, powerless to set its own course through the goddamn rapids.

His hand falls, is stuffed back into the pocket of his hoodie, and he drains the last of the coffee jug and drops it into the already-overflowing sink at his home through a shortcut.

Sans is leaning against the wall next to Alphys' desk in the Lab, waiting for her to arrive. Above the desk, hanging on the wall by little hooks, is a massive rectangular sword, sparkling with the dust of a once-beloved Captain of the Royal Guard. A stray thought makes Sans realize he would've liked to examined Undyne's dust before it got used up in the funeral, but he pushes it away. No point in thinking about that now.

A hiss of pressurized air marks the front door opening.

"H-hi," Alphys mutters. She's not wearing her lab coat.

"heya," the skeleton says in return, with a smile he instills with thankfulness he doesn't really feel. A shortcut opens next to him on the wall, showing Alphys' wardrobe in the room upstairs. Sans holds out a hand in front of the crack.

Alphys has to pause to understand what he's doing. She doesn't look like she had a good night's sleep either. "Oh. Thanks." She steps close, and he puts his hand on her shoulder automatically so she can reach through the shortcut and grab a fresh lab coat. While she's putting it on, he lets the crack shrink and close and pushes off the wall.

"So, w-what are we doing?"

Sans takes the lead, directing them to the elevator, but he opens another shortcut halfway there that takes them straight down to the ledge surrounding the Extractor. The Soul Displacer is still right where he left it, bundled up in the Extractor's empty right socket. The seventh soul looks the same, floating inside its pod in the left socket, bathing them in crimson light.

"we gotta put those two together," Sans says, pointing to the right socket. "i'm betting that the problem's gonna be in the power source. merging the two mechanisms can't be that hard, but the displacer uses blue magic, not plain old electricity. we'll have to either convert its energy source or somehow make the whole extractor run on blue magic."

There's a delay. When he looks at Alphys, she seems concerned.

"Um... w-won't draining your magic be d-dangerous?"

Sans shrugs. "probably. might have to come up with something to keep me from dying halfway through. just to be safe?" he offers casually, with a slightly amused smile.

"W-well, yeah! I'm n-not letting you k- _kill_ yourself for this!" Alphys replies in exasperation, like she can't believe her ears.

The skeleton has to hold in a little laugh. "let's get cracking then."

~~~~~~~~

They're back in his old office, the room with one half of it devoid of life and furniture, sitting on either end of his desk with a mess of papers and blueprint sketches between them. Sans is pretty sure it's been a couple hours, Alphys has complained about being hungry at least twice now.

The lizard shuffles the papers around and picks up one page covered in handwritten scrawls, lines of text scratched over and rewritten, a mess of arrows and numbers and quasi-intelligible little doodles. They've been trying to come up with a plan of action on this sheet, and they've finally arrived on something that should work well. While Alphys scans the list for the upteenth time, Sans grab a blank page and digs a pen out from under the layers of papers. "want me to write it down nice and clean?"

Alphys nods with her eyes on the paper. "Y-yeah. I uh... Th-this is the safest we c-can be, right?" She looks up at him uncertainly.

He offers her a nod and soothing smile. "can't think of much else we could do short of just not trying to solve this." He indicates the paper in her claws with his chin. "go ahead."

The lizard smooths out the paper and starts reading through the mess of scrawls. "O-okay. So, before we start t-toying with the machines, w-we decided to g-get another extract first. We'll g-get KD from the g-green soul and distill it into..." She looks at him for confirmation.

"healing serum," Sans says simply, without looking away from his own budding list. Something else Gaster worked on. Useful stuff, really powerful. A healing strong enough to keep just about anything alive under any circumstances.

Alphys nods to herself. "Y-yeah, that. You said we'd only need o-one IS bag, right?"

"yep."

"Okay. So, o-once we have that, we'll get started o-on the machines. Converting the Displacer t-to run on electricity will make it s-stop working, from what we've s-seen on the blueprints, s-so we'll have to make th-the whole thing run on your b-blue magic. you'll have a-an IS drip with the healing serum s-so you won't... d-die."

"yep."

Alphys shuffles around some of the schematics they've sketched nervously. "A-and then it's just a m-matter of... s-separating the souls, and taking the r-red one back to Asgore."

"yep."

~~~~~~~~

"knock knock."

Asgore's wandering thoughts come to a halt. His eyes are drawn away from the bed of golden flowers, past his throne, to the open archway of the entrance. "Ah, Sans." The watering can is left on the throne when the king walks past it. "How are your efforts with Alphys going? Well, I hope?"

The skeleton shrugs. "about as well as they can be. we figured out the problem and a solution, but i'm gonna need to borrow the green soul for a little while to make it work. figured i'd let you know."

"Of course," Asgore says with a nod. He's smiling, but he can't really inject the same level of comforting warmth into it as he usually does. Not surprising, really. He sweeps a hand back toward the other archway behind him, the path to the Barrier. "Would you like me to bring them up?"

"sure."

It's a short way to the Barrier, and after a quick press of a button under his cape -a dark maroon one today- the six soul pods rise through the floor. The spot in the middle meant for the seventh soul is empty, of course. Sans holds out a hand toward the pod with the green soul and pulls it out, wreathed in blue. "thanks."

Asgore isn't really listening. He's looking outside, beyond the pulsing wall of light. It's only a tiny little portion of the sky that's visible from here, way down at the end of the cavernous tunnel. The Barrier leeches all color from the view beyond it, nothing but gray tones visible through the shifting mist, but Asgore has been watching the same little piece of sky so long that the colorless grays are easy to decipher.

It's sunset outside.

The king's thoughts turn back to where they'd been wandering before Sans scattered them.

Seven souls. Freedom is within their reach, after endless centuries of imprisonment under the mountain. And yet... Asgore finds himself dreading the outcome. It is his duty as King to use the seven souls to break the Barrier, but what happens after that? Will there be peace with the humans on the surface? How _can_ there be with him present, a god incarnate, a monster drawing its power from the souls of _children?_ Will he ever be able to return to his old self? Will he have to slaughter every last human in order to ensure the safety of his people? Will he have to become a merciless ruler, striking fear into their hearts instead to keep them compliant like his predecessor?

Asgore's mouth presses together. His fists clench.

He blinks.

A groaned sigh drains out of him as he runs a hand over his eyes. "My apologies, Sans. I was-"

The skeleton is gone. Of course. Asgore chuckles despite himself and shakes his head. Another press of the button under his cape sends the souls back to the basement, and shortly after Asgore himself is back in the throne room to resume watering his garden.

Unnoticed, one of the flowers sinks into the ground.

~~~~~~~~

Alphys hasn't left the Lab all day. Not unusual in itself, but this time she's actually trying to keep contact with her family. Sans has gone off to get the KD extract and whatever else it is that he needs to make the healing serum, so she's taken the time to eat lunch and call her mother. She got nagged a little bit for eating the 'microwave noodles', as her mother calls them, but honestly it was almost nice to hear that again, if slightly annoying.

Now, Alphys is down in the old tunnels again, in the room where she and Sans agreed to meet once he was ready. The mirrored sections on the wall behind her are the same, and the dead flowers are all gone so they can have a decent workspace. There aren't any tools in place or anything else beyond a flat, empty surface. Sans said he'd take care of those. All she did was clear the way in here.

Alphys shakes her head. She's still overthinking this. Or rather, a part of her is still suspicious of Sans, but she doesn't have much of a choice at this point. He's definitely borrowed the green soul from Asgore already, and the lights flickered while she was eating earlier, which is always a surefire sign of the Extractor being activated. No turning back now. And she _is_ just a little bit curious to see what the device is like, the equipment they're going to use to make the healing serum. Sans didn't give her a name to refer to it.

Finally, a crack forms in the air at the far end of the room, spreads out, opens into darkness, then flickers and becomes see-through. The skeleton steps in, carrying four large bottles of KD extract against his chest, his hoodie tinted teal with the acidic green glow. He sets all four of them on the counter and pushes them against the wall.

"Um... d-do we really need that much extract for just o-one IS bag?" Alphys is measuring the quartet of flasks with some apprehension. "I-isn't this bad for the soul?"

"nah." Sans isn't looking at her. He's opened a second shortcut and is busy pulling things through it to start assembling the machine. "not to the green one. and we do need this much because we won't just be making the serum."

"We won't? Y-you didn't mention that before."

"that's because we're not gonna use the other thing, it's just a byproduct of how the distiller works. it separates and concentrates the extract into whatever kinds of raw magic are in it. with KD, that's healing and green magic."

Alphys is watching Sans work now. It's hard to understand what he's doing, not only because she doesn't know how the Distiller works or what it looks like, but because he keeps constantly switching between putting the pieces in a messy pile and pulling them out of said pile to actually fit them to the machine. Even so, the mechanism is slowly coming together under his bony fingers. "W-what does DT get s-separated into?"

The skeleton chuckles. "it doesn't. DT's its own special thing, the extract just gets more concentrated when it goes through. red magic, if you wanna call it that." He shrugs.

"Oh. W-what about the other Traits?"

"BV gives orange magic, but the other half is this sorta explosive stuff. IT gives blue magic and..." Sans pauses. "uh. it's hard to explain. the doc used to call it 'kinetic fluid', he used it to make his stuff run better without increasing the power consumption." The skeleton shakes his head and goes back to assembling the Distiller. "anyway. JT is yellow magic and some electric stuff. PS is purple magic and poison. and PT is cyan magic and icy stuff."

For a while, there's just the noise of Sans' hands working.

This is so much information. Alphys never even considered experimenting with the other Soul Traits, mostly because, by the time she unknowingly took over the operation, everything was already pointing to Determination as the... well, _determining_ factor for breaking the Barrier. With her eagerness to get results and impress Asgore, Alphys had latched on to the DT experiments until they went horribly wrong, and after that she just stopped completely.

Sans looks like he's done assembling the Distiller now. It... looks rather plain, actually, compared to the mess of parts making up the inside. It has two nozzles at the front for the products of the distillation, and an entry port at the top that can accommodate just about any manner of input. The inner workings are hidden under a metallic shell now, but Alphys saw a lot of tubes and glass compartments and electrical parts being put together earlier.

The skeleton grabs a coil of rubber hose, cuts four long pieces out of it, fits each one to the mouth of one of the KD vials, then shoves the free ends into the top of the Distiller and turns the thing on with the flip of a switch. The neon green fills the tubes quickly as the device begins to hum and vibrate. Sans then puts an IS bag on each of the exit nozzles, just in time to start catching the slow dribble of fluid. One of them begins to fill with the rich green that Undyne used to cast upon her foes. The other collects a lime color, even brighter than the KD extract itself.

Alphys can't help but reach a hand for the bag with the darker green. It doesn't have any temperature to it. The fluid moves like liquefied smoke behind the thick plastic. "So... th-this is green magic?"

"yep. or a shortcut to it, if you want to get technical." Sans shrugs. "it'll give you green magic if you're compatible with it."

Alphys stares at the green. Most monsters have one or two type of magic they're naturally adept at, but it's always possible to learn other types through practice. And at times, being in a certain environment will also influence a monster's magic. Snowdin is famous for instilling cyan magic into its more susceptible residents, and a similar phenomenon can be found in Hotland with orange magic. Almost every region of the Underground has at least one type of magic associated with it, with Waterfall being one of the few exceptions.

"U-um... compatible?"

Sans nods. "yeah. a soul can just reject foreign magic that's injected into it, especially when it's raw like this. paps got pretty sick when the doc gave me and him blue magic, he wasn't fully compatible with it. it didn't blend well with the stuff he already had and he ended up losing it. only kept the healing."

"He lost his o-original magic?"

"yep. and because the blue never molded well to his soul it wasn't as strong as it could be." The skeleton's hand is on the dusty scarf around his neck again. "i taught him cyan magic so he could have more than one option, but i didn't want him putting himself in danger with yellow. never was great at it anyway."

There's a few seconds of silence. The IS bags are about a third full.

"W-what kind of magic did he h-have before?"

"orange and green."

Bravery and Kindness, Alphys thinks to herself. And Sans has... Patience and Justice. Yellow magic. It's pretty rare to find a monster that's proficient at it, mostly because all monsters are already capable of creating their own attacks without the need of their opponent to help them. But yellow magic locks the target into always using the same bullet-like projectiles, which are always guaranteed to be reliable.

Alphys herself has yellow as her primary magic, which she kind of hates? But it at least gives her easy access to electricity magic as well, and she's picked up a bit of orange since moving to Hotland, so she doesn't _have_ to use yellow on the rare occasion she might find herself in a fight. Which is never, thankfully.

The bags are two thirds full.

Papyrus could still heal even after losing his old magic, Sans said. But that's expected. Lots of monsters can heal. It's one of the easier kinds of magic to pick up. The strength of the healing varies, of course, and monsters who naturally have green magic are always capable of healing to some extent, so the two _are_ connected but they're each their own thing as well.

"Did... um... did P-Papyrus' healing get any w-weaker when he lost his green magic?"

"nope. it was always pretty damn strong."

 

...

 

"Sans... w-why are you telling me all this? You're n-never this open."

The skeleton shrugs. "best way to get you to help me. and everything's fucked anyway. no point in hiding anymore." He looks like he wants to say more, but... "that's about it," he concludes instead.

Alphys goes back to staring at the green in the bags. She's still not sure if she can trust him, but it's so... he's telling her so much! She's actually getting to understand why he's like this, what happened to the maker of the blueprints she used, and so many other things! Alphys can't help but be drawn in by her own curiosity, one of the main reasons why she always liked science in the first place. That irresistible draw of the unknown, of a mystery waiting to be solved, of a question without an answer. Except that in this case, she's actually _finding_ the answers, sometimes to questions she never even thought to ask.

The Distiller gives one final rattle and stills. The bags are full.

Sans steps in and unhooks everything from the machine, but he doesn't bother messing with the four empty bottles of KD extract. He just picks up the two IS bags, one on each hand, and passes both through a shortcut to a safe storage space elsewhere in the underground complex, then clacks his fingers together as though dusting them off.

"all done." The little shortcut closes, only for another one to open leading to the Extractor. Sans holds out a hand. "now's your turn, alph."

"R-right."

Alphys takes a deep, slightly shaky breath, wraps her claws around his bony fingers, and they pass through.

Adapting the Extractor is going to take a lot of work.


	18. Separated, Reunited

Flowey is bored.

How many days has it been since those two idiots started doing whatever it is they're doing to that machine? Too many, that's what. Way too many. He got tired of listening to them bicker and argue through the walls of the underground labs. Flowey had been keeping tabs on Sans and Alphys, they're by far the most important players in this mess so far, but he just couldn't stand it. And since he can't reset, he thought it best to just step away for a little while before he did anything rash.

Flowey is lying on what can be said to be his back, flat on the ground, his arm-leaves splayed out limp, while he stares up listless at the hole that has been the doom of seven of the eight humans to have seen the Underground. Golden flowers surround him, swaying slightly in some unseen breeze.

This inability to Save and Reset is the worst part of it all. He can't even have fun! He has to be careful all the time, keep hiding himself, reduced to eavesdropping through the ground or peeking under the cover of his fellow flowers. It's so annoying! And there's nothing else interesting going on in the Underground either. Everyone's still either in mourning or just waiting for Sans and Alphys to be done doing their thing.

"Uuuuuuugh," Flowey groans as he pulls himself straight.

A thorny vine pokes out of the dirt nearby and curls around the stem of a flower, bending it to make the disc face him. The end of the vine curves around to the front and scratches a little face into it, a crude simile of Flowey's own fake smile. The wounds on the plant make yellowish sap start leaking down the flower's disc. Flowey watches it for a few seconds before crushing the thing into a pulp and tossing it away, out of sight, outside the circle of flowers.

His arm-leaves fold across his stem.

Soulless. He's soulless. Nothing but negative emotions. He can't feel anything positive or pleasant. Not that he wants to! He doesn't! The only reason he wants those souls is so he can do things _his_ way! And...

His expression softens. He sinks into the ground and darts through his secret tunnels, until he comes out inside the grave under the red-leaved tree.

Chara. He wants Chara.

They really _were_ responsible for everything, he has confirmation now. The trashbag said as much. Chara was in that human's body, their souls are together, and they're going to be separated. The human's soul will go back to Asgore, so he can break the Barrier, but what about Chara's? What will they do with it? Whatever it is, Flowey won't let it come to fruition.

He remembers what it felt like when he and Chara were together in the same body before. Power. So much power. Almost _too_ much. Like he was trying to contain a perpetual explosion in his chest. His leaves touch the center of his stem. A vine extends and traces a heart into the bone dust. Wasted. All that power, _wasted_ . Because of him. Because he was _weak_. Because he didn't know the truth of the world.

Kill or be killed.

Chara knew. Chara always knew. They never talked about their life from before they fell, but they knew how things worked. How the world operated. The mercilessness of it all. They knew how to be strong, how to _survive_. They didn't need anyone else.

If Flowey takes their soul back...

He wonders if they'll be able to cross the Barrier again? He doesn't have a soul anymore, and it takes at least one monster soul and one human soul to do it. Granted, they won't _need_ to. With Chara by his side, he'll likely be able to get the other souls as well and take control of the timeline, and then he'll be able to do anything he wants! Oooohhhh, it'd be so much fun, dangling the possibility of breaking the Barrier over everyone's heads like a toy just out of reach!

Just like how Chara used to do it to him sometimes, even though the two of them were almost exactly the same height. They'd climb onto a chair or stool and just hold one of his plushies over his head until he started crying out of frustration.

Flowey shakes his disc. Don't think about that. Chara always did what they did to make him stronger. All they ever wanted to do was help him. And it was only after he lost them that he truly understood the extent of their efforts. Getting stronger isn't pleasant. You might not even agree with it at first. But it's for your own good. And, in the case of him and Chara, it was for the good of everyone. They had to be strong for their plan to work. For them to be able to free mpnsterkind, together.

And he wasn't.

He wipes away the heart he traced into the bone dust and sinks back into his tunnels. Where to next? The ruins are all but empty, it's the only place he's able to let loose without raising any alarms. No cameras to worry about, and almost no one comes in from Snowdin or anywhere else, everyone's just too used to the door being sealed. He's reduced almost the entire population of the ruins to dust in his vines over the past few days, and now he doesn't have anything to play with. Pouring said dust on hapless monsters is only amusing so many times.

Maybe he should check back on the trashbag and the dumb lizard? Couldn't hurt. Flowey's cooled off now, he's not angry anymore. Just bored. And those two idiots _were_ getting close to completing whatever it is they were doing, last he checked. He might as well go keep an eye on them some more.

The flower darts away, slithering beneath the ground along his own roots. He casts his mind ahead, to the network of vines he's left around the underground tunnels of the lab. He didn't use to have such a thick presence around the place he was made, but he's added as many vines as possible so he could monitor the idiot pair closely.

It's not hard to find them ahead when he starts crawling through the warm brown stone of Hotland, and...

Wait.

They're in the room with the Extractor! Are they going to do it?! Flowey hurries forward, flowing down alongside the elevator shaft, around the tunnels, all the way to a little gap in the metal in the corner of the wall he can use to peek into the room.

Yeah, it looks like they're ready! Finally! He got here just in time, they're still setting things up. He settles down to watch, coiling part of his stem under him like a snake.

Sans and Alphys have a wheeled table next to them holding the stuff they're going to use. Right now, they're busy fitting some kind of receptacle into the mouth of the Extractor, it kind of looks like a soul pod? But much smaller and simpler. The cylinder clicks into place and is secured by several little mechanical arms that close around the curved glass.

The pod with the soul looks different too. Or rather, the socket around it. The soul itself isn't even visible, it's hidden behind a mess of metal and wires wrapped across the front of the pod, it's the parts taken from the Soul Displacer and incorporated into the Extractor. So that makes the whole thing a Soul Extractor then? Flowey shakes his head and pushes the thought aside. The name isn't important. What matters is what that thing is going to do.

Alphys is doing stuff to Sans now. He's taken off his hoodie so she can fit a... what even is that? It's what's going to harvest his magic, Flowey knows that, he's listened to them putting the thing together. But it looks like a big awkward glove, covering the skeleton's whole forearm, locked around each bone individually, also covered in wires attached to the metal frame. Some of the thickest wires are hanging instead of wrapping around the bones, and Alphys picks these up and plugs them into the Extractor, somewhere on the underside of the machine. There's a second part to the glove thing on the end of more wires, a smaller metal frame with a ring in the middle, that Alphys fits around the skeleton's left socket.

Sans is flexing his fingers experimentally and feeling around his eye when his soul forms in front of his sternum. It hangs there, like a light bulb with a bug sitting on it, while the lizard sets up the bag of healing serum on a stand, fits a catheter to the bottom and a needle to the end of that. She takes Sans' heart in her shaking hand and carefully pushes the needle into the center of it at an angle. The skeleton winces. "shame you don't have wings and a diaper, huh alph?" he jokes with a grin.

"This is a n-needle, Sans, not an arrow," Alphys retorts dryly while she pulls the catheter into a loose loop around his heart to help keep the needle in place. Tape doesn't stick well to souls.

Flowey giggles under his breath. Seems like the two idiots are still throwing barbs at each other. He bets they're both going to be glad when this is all over and they don't have to stare at the other anymore. He doesn't blame them, really. Between the smiley trashbag and the dumb lizard, they're not exactly winning any beauty pageants anytime soon.

Alphys steps away from the skeleton, and Flowey has to tilt his disc  and bend his stem to get her back into his limited field of view. She's opened the control panel for the Extractor. He can hear and feel typing through the metal of the wall with his vines, but he can't see the screen from this angle. And even if he could he probably wouldn't be able to read it anyway, not at this distance. This room is way too big.

"Whenever you're r-ready," the lizard says with one final key press.

Ohhh, this is the part Flowey's been waiting for. He presses his eye to the gap in the metal, to make sure he can see all of it. He wonders if the trashbag's going to die? That'd be hilarious! He's working so hard to save this stupid soul, only to end up dying himself in the process! Hah! Flowey has to bite back a laugh so he can turn his attention back to the skeleton.

Sans takes a deep breath.

Why do skeletons even do that, anyway? They don't need to breathe. But it's some kind of psychological thing, isn't it? Flowey vaguely recalls hearing something like that a long time ago from... someone he doesn't remember. He pushes this thought aside as well. The only monster he's interested in right now is the trashbag.

Sans lifts the hand with the glove and splays it out toward the Extractor. When his sockets open, the right one is dark and empty, the left one is flickering cyan and yellow, surrounded by a half-mask of wires and metal matching the glove. The machine starts to hum and rattle. The lights around the soul activate with the vibrant azure of blue magic. Flowey can just barely see the red heart start to lose shape, edges becoming fuzzy and indistinct.

"It n-needs more," Alphys says, eyes on the control panel.

The skeleton doesn't move, but the noise of the Extractor grows. The soul dissolves further, becoming a thick bundle of glowing red mist inside its pod. Cyan starts to bead on Sans' forehead as the crimson pulls out thinner, fills more of the inside of the pod. A mechanic whine emanates from the machine.

"A-almost. The lockdown on the s-second soul is almost done. Th-they're still bound t-too tight."

Flowey can't help a tiny giggle from escaping when Sans grunts in exertion and stumbles until his back hits the wall. The trashbag's hand is shaking, he can see the ripples in the wires trailing off the glove thing.

"Sans!" Alphys hurries to his side, of course she does. She wraps an arm across his back and pulls his other limb over her shoulders to keep him standing. "I-I'm here, it's o-okay. Just a l-little more." Her eyes keep bouncing between the skeleton, who by now is sweating so hard his skull is dripping, and the Extractor's control panel. Her free hand even clutches the bag of healing serum and squeezes it to pump more of it into the skeleton's soul.

The crimson mist of the soul is changing. There's spots of black forming in the red, like ink blots soaking into thick paper from behind, blooming outward slowly. They crawl, snail-like, toward the center of the pod, flowing like vaporized tar, and all the time, Sans is just getting worse, the shaking of his hand spreading to his shoulder, his spine, his knees, so much that they give out and Alphys has to support his weight. His sockets have squeezed shut again, but the left one is flashing so bright the cyan and yellow are seeping through the bone around it.

Is it just Flowey, or are his bones looking a little less opaque than they should?

Then, there's a quiet little 'ping', almost completely drowned out by the noise of the machine. The black has pulled into a tight ball of darkness inside the pod. "It's locked!" Alphys announces hurriedly.

Sans doesn't answer. His wire-covered hand clenches and moves, first up then down in an arc. Inside the machine the black follows the movement, flowing up and out of sight behind the metal face of the Extractor, then coming out inside the lower receptacle. It oozes out in a single large dollop, and then just hangs there in the newer improvised soul pod, a tiny ball of tar flowing within itself.

The noise of the machine dies immediately. The skeleton's socket goes out and he falls completely limp in Alphys' hold, panting like he's just run a marathon. "Sans!" She lowers him onto the ground, props him up sitting against the wall, even brings the bag of healing serum down with them in her claws.

Flowey presses his face harder to the gap in the wall, an eager grin splitting his disc.

"Sans, t-talk to me! Please!"

At first, the skeleton doesn't respond, even while Alphys feverishly starts to disassemble the glove and pull the metal away from his skull. He just sits there, breathing hard and ragged, damp with sweat, with the IS drip still feeding into his soul. Half of the serum is gone.

"S-Sans..."

Slowly, his mouth tugs into a shaky, exhausted grin. He chuckles breathily. When his sockets open, they're dark and empty.

Flowey huffs and folds his arm-leaves. What a rip-off. He didn't even die!

"you know what it feels like to get dusted?"

"What? I-I..." The lizard fidgets with the IS bag in her hands. "Are the... r-reports going dark?"

Sans chuckles again. "some of them, yeah." He blinks, making his eye lights return so he can look up at Alphys. "you lucked out, alph. got the timeline where everything works and i don't die."

The lizard seems uncomfortable. "Oh. O-okay." She gets to her feet and hooks the IS bag onto its stand again. "Let's just g-get you stable. C-come on," she says, hooking an arm under Sans' own, but while he does let himself be dragged to his feet he shakes his head.

"no. we're n-ngh!" He cringes when Alphys yanks the needle out of his soul. "...fuck," the skeleton concludes, letting the heart dissipate and soak back into his bones through his shirt. The fabric is soaked through with cyan sweat. He's looking at the lower pod, holding the black ball, but it seems like he can barely keep his sockets open.

Alphys eyes the orb of tar with what seems to be confusion. "I-is that... C-Chara's soul? It's not even sh-shaped like a heart..."

Sans hums vaguely under his breath. He's still holding onto her tight to support himself, but his breathing is slowly going back to normal. It's pretty obvious he's struggling to stay awake. "guess the void doesn't agree with souls too well." He rubs a hand over his face. He's not even standing by his own power, Alphys is having to hold him upright.

"Sans?"

He shakes his head. "i'm fine, just... heh, feeling... a bit... bone tireeehhh..." He doesn't even finish the sentence. His body falls limp again, hanging off the arm Alphys is holding over her shoulders, and just like that, the skeleton is asleep.

Flowey has to hold back a laugh, still watching from his secret spot behind the wall. Oh, this is too easy!

Alphys is definitely looking uncomfortable now. She's even sweating! "U-uh?! Sans?!" She rattles Sans a little, but there's no response. "O-okay, he's just... sleeping. It's f-fine. I-I'll just..." She looks around, free hand fidgeting, until she simply lowers him to the floor and shuffles over to the wheeled table. All the stuff on top of it and the parts of the glove thing and the IS bag and stand and everything, Alphys gathers and shoves messily into the lower shelf, leaving the top free. She then goes back to Sans' side, gathers him in her arms with visible ease (skeletons are very light, after all), and lays him atop the table so she can wheel him away.

Flowey bursts out laughing as soon as she's too far away to hear.

He slithers through the rock behind the metal of the wall, until he's right below where the two idiots were standing just now. On the side of the pit beneath the Extractor, he easily bends the metal panes out of the way and pokes himself out, extending his stem snake-like until he's level with the lowest soul pod. Several thorny vines follow the motion and wrap around the curved glass, push the little mechanical arms away, and yank the cylinder out. He wraps it in a thick layer of vines and dives back into the ground, holding the pod close to what amounts to his chest as he tears his way through the stone to make way for the extra volume.

If he's going to reunite with Chara, he's going to do it right.


	19. The Angel of Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I completely forgot to post this yesterday. Oh well. It's here now, enjoy.  
> I hope the pronouns don't get confusing, having two characters that go by 'they' is annoying to write with.  
> And uh, there's death and suicide in this one so, tread carefully?

What does it feel like, to die?

Painful, at first. The agony of whatever wounds and suffering are leading to it. But the death itself comes almost as a relief. Everything fades to black. All sensations cease. There's just infinite darkness, and their own consciousness, until everything rushes back into place like a tidal wave and they go back to the last spark.

The last Save Point.

It's very disorienting, the first time it happens. They pass by another golden spark hanging in the air but think nothing of it. It's just another little quirk of the Underground, as far as they know. A little quirk that only they can see. But then, later on, when they're walking with the prince, talking, teasing each other as siblings ought to do, they shove him playfully, the rock gives way, and he plummets over the edge into the magma below, and in their efforts to grab him they're the next one to fall.

The heat engulfs them. For a few moments, their entire world is agony. Then, the static, empty embrace of darkness. Only the crimson light of their soul to break the black. And finally, they're suddenly back by the spark and stumble so hard they almost fall flat on their face.

Once the shock wears off, and they're alone in their room that night, the room they share with the prince, they decide to experiment. Noiselessly, they slide out of bed and sneak down the corridor to the kitchen, knowing just where to step to keep the floor from creaking. They carefully pull a drawer open, and grab a knife, the really sharp one Ms. Dreemurr uses to cut vegetables. They've accidentally cut themself with it in the past.

This time, it's intentional.

They hold their arm over the sink, watching the blood flow, watching it tint the white fur stuck in the drain. Their vision starts to blur and lose color. A cold sweat breaks out across their body. They clutch the countertop, but their strength is fading fast. Their knees give out. But they never feel the impact with the floor. They just fall away, back through the black and to the spark, earlier in the same day.

They don't tell anyone. Not even the prince, who they've grown most fond of. They start taking every opportunity they can to do it. Jumping into the fathomless pit in Waterfall. Dropping into the magma of Hotland again. Wandering into the cold forest of Snowdin until they're hopelessly lost. They come up with names. The sparks become Save Points. The trips back, Resets. They even get used to the sensory overload of said Resets, and learn how to tie their return to a specific Save Point, and start carrying a knife with them under their clothes so they can Reset anytime they want.

Eventually, they decide to tell the Royal Scientist about it, out of curiosity. They can just Reset, after all, if something they don't like happens. They even make a drawing of the Save Point for him! But he can't offer any insight, and they suspect he doesn't _really_ believe them either. Not that it matters, anyway.

As nice as the ability is, however, it gets in the way when they start to come up with the Plan with their brother. He'll have to take their soul for it to work. They can't Reset then. But with more experimenting, they find out that they can _choose_ to Reset. When they die, their soul leaves their body, and if they don't Reset then it just hangs there, holding their entire consciousness. They're aware of their surroundings, but powerless to interact with anything. They Reset repeatedly, until they've learned how to control it flawlessly, and only then, the Plan can move forward.

The buttercups end up giving them one of the worst deaths they've ever experienced. Not because of the pain, they've had way worse pain before, countless times. But it's the delay in it that they hate. Having to feel themself waste away into nothing, and watch the Dreemurrs worry more and more. Their knife is so much more reliable. Just a quick poke in the neck, and a few seconds later they're falling into the black. But no, it has to be this way. They can't rouse suspicion. They need their brother there, next to them, when it finally happens.

And it does. At night. They call out to him, wake him from whatever light sleep he's in, and he hurries to their bedside, just in time to catch their last few words. They die, and cling to reality inside their soul, until he takes them in his hands and they feel themself soak into his flesh, up his arms, into his chest. They become aware of _his_ soul, merging with their own, melding their minds together, they can feel his pain as their now-shared body is warped.

Their brother is clutching his muzzle tight so he doesn't shout out. Wings bubble out of his back, horns tear through his scalp, his tail extends and gain a brush-like tip. The longer the two of them are together, the more control they gain over his body, and by the time the transformation is complete their brother has taken a backseat in their shared mindspace. They look down at their new self.

The green-and-yellow sweater is in tatters, which they brush of; the black pants held up alright, at least, even if they're short now. White, reflective fur covers their chest, their limbs, their neck and face and long floppy ears. Their brother is asking if it worked through his thoughts, and they reassure him that yes, it worked, while they move over to their dresser and pull out a mirror they'd stowed away. Their claws are black, and in the mirror they find the same color on their teeth and horns and on thin markings on their face. Their eyes are a bright red, the red of their soul. They look much older than their brother ever did, much bigger. Much more powerful.

They wander back to the bed. Looking down at themself feels weird. Their brother asks what happens next, and they tell him to let them handle it as they cradle their former body to their front.

The Capital below is sleeping as they wander out into the open. Silence, only broken by the faint clicking of their claws on the stone, and the occasional whisper of feathers rubbing against one another when they adjust their new wings. There's a muffled rustling of grass when they walk past the thrones, and finally, they pause at the Barrier. A wall of shifting light and smoke. Passing through it feels like phasing through cool silk; a weak resistance that snags at their fur ever-so-slightly.

Their brother is speechless at the sights that follow.

The world outside is sleeping as well. Dark blues and grays all around. A starlit sky hangs above, with a waning moon. They walk for hours, not just because the destination is far away, but because they go slowly and weave this way and that, to let their brother enjoy the surface. They walk for so long that the sky begins to lighten to the east, inky black giving way to dark blue, to purple, tyrian, pink, soft orange. They even take the time to find a perch, a tall boulder, to stand on and watch the sunrise. The whole time, their brother is completely silent, but he's crying in their shared mindspace and they tease him about it, as always.

Eventually, they reach the village, and the patch of golden flowers in the main square. They lay their own cold, lifeless body on the petals and stand over it, knowing the residents will come out soon. Their brother asks what they're waiting for.

They don't answer.

He asks again with the noise of doors swinging open, voices approaching from behind them.

They still don't answer.

Suddenly, a hush falls behind them. Silence, for a few seconds, where the world seems to stop. And then, the terrified scream that sets everything off.

They're about to whip around and start fighting, but they can't move! Their brother takes over his own body again. They shout, scream at him to let them do this, to let them finish the Plan, but he refuses. He doesn't want to kill anyone, he says, even as the first arrow finds its mark on his back, and their shared body cries out in pain. All they can do is watch in horror as their brother just weathers the blows, never retaliating, never lashing out. He just bends down, picks up their dead body again, and begins to retrace their steps back to the mountain.

He's apologizing in their shared mind, but they can't understand it. He agreed to it! He agreed to the whole plan! They're on the surface, and he wants to go back Underground?! To the fake stars, the sunless light, the rain that drips from the rock?!

He doesn't care. The surface is beautiful but it's not worth killing for, be it six humans or just one. He never should've done this. He keeps apologizing and crying, and they just don't understand. They give up trying to reason with him.

The mountain looms above them. He's trailing dust, not just from his wounds, but his tail is crumbling, the feathers at the wingtips are falling apart, the horns are turning into nubs. His entire being is shrinking so that, by the time they step through the Barrier again, he's back to his old self, except that his sweater is gone and his fur is still sloughing off in dusty streams. He's barely holding himself together, let alone actually carrying their dead body now that they're both the same size again, he only makes it about as far as the throne room before his knees buckle.

Mr. Dreemurr arrives just in time to see his son and adopted child fall. They see him hurry to the former's side through their brother's eyes, but now they're afraid. They're dying! Monster souls, even those of Boss monsters, shatter after the monster dies. And theirs is melded with their brother's! What will happen to them?!

The king calls for the queen and both kneel around their son, the dead child nearby momentarily forgotten.

They can feel their brother's body crumbling with every passing second while he talks to his parents about the Plan, and every speck of dust that falls weakens their presence. They're slipping away! No! They don't want to die! They panic and try to reset, even before their brother has completely turned to dust, and...

They fail.

They're in the hollow black again, but their soul is... broken. Wrong. And they can't go back. They find a lone golden spark in the empty void, but they can't access it. Their save point. All they can do is look through it and see the timeline moving on without them.

They watch the last of their brother's dust flow through the claws of the king and queen. They watch the Royal Scientist give his condolences to the grieving parents. They watch monsterkind mourn the loss of the royal children, and the golden flowers spread across the Underground from where a single seed was planted when their brother passed, brought in from the Surface on the clothes of their dead self.

They try to explore the inky blackness, but there's nothing to find, nothing to see or do or anyone to talk to. It's just empty, and endless, and cold in the sense that it has to actual temperature. Just a vacuum. Nothing more.

They cling to their broken soul and watch reality like a movie that never ends. And slowly, gradually, the resentment grows.

The queen leaves the king after the loss of their children and the argument that follows. Generations of monsters are born and turn to dust. Every now and then, another unfortunate human falls into the Underground. Children, like them, but they feel no sympathy. The queen tries to keep them, nurture them, save them from the doom that awaits on the road beyond the Ruins, but none of them stay, none of them listen.

The Royal Scientist takes their souls, sometimes with his bare hands, to experiment with. At the bidding of the king, but the child in the void realizes quickly that he's doing it for his own benefit as well. He even captures two of the humans alive and tears the souls out of their bodies to show the king, but the humans are used as tools to explore their inner anatomy. It's easily the most interesting thing to see across the whole Underground, and from their unknown seat in the void the child with the broken, worn-down soul watches. Even when the scientist ends up foisted with two skeleton brothers, unwanted by their own parents, distantly related to him, the last ones to carry his name, he doesn't let it deter him from his research.

When he stumbles across something he calls Determination, things get _really_ interesting. The experiments get more extreme. The subjects meld together into semi-solid abominations. He revives Asriel by accident, inside the pitiful vessel of a golden flower with it. He injects _himself_ with it, and starts talking about resets and save points, just like they'd told him so very long ago! He still has that drawing they made for him and everything, of the golden spark! They can't believe it!

But... he can't reset. He tries to open the save point by force, and succeeds too much. He Falls.

And joins them in the Void.

For the first time since their death, they have company! Someone who can see and hear them, someone they can talk to and watch the timeline with! Oh, and how the two of them talk. Neither of them has no one else, after all, and all the time in the Void to bare their whole lives to each other. The child grows closer to this old, forgotten monster than anyone else they've ever met.

But then, another human falls into the Underground.

At first, things go just like every other time. The human meets with... _Flowey_ , as Asriel calls himself now. Toriel intervenes. She guides them, then leaves them. But they're weak. So very weak. Weaker than the child in the Void ever was. And they die to the first monster that tries to fight them.

Except that, it doesn't end there. The save point they're watching through flickers. A wisp of red, the same red that their own soul once held, seeps out snake-like, as the spark shrinks and dies. Another spark lights up a short distance away. The wisp flows and sinks into it. And then, the human is back to standing next to a pile of leaves in the Ruins, unharmed. And by their reaction, the child in the Void knows exactly what happened.

This human can reset. None of the others could. But this one is Determined.

They watch this new human closely. They follow their every step through the save points, their every reset and smallest action. The human gets a little better at dodging magical attacks, but they never retaliate. They meet up with Toriel again, and stay with her for a few days, but ultimately decide to leave. She fights them and kills them the first time, but the second time, they convince her to let them pass.

Flow- no. _Asriel_ talks to them again. It's nice to see that he's learned his lesson, at least. Kill, or be killed. He's so much stronger now, even as a puny little flower. The child in the Void should be proud, but... their soul has never been more broken. Worn down by void and time, dull, black, barely a soul anymore. They cling to the adventures of the human instead, to that familiar not-heat of Determination that they no longer have.

They watch the human talk to the relatives of the scientist, the two skeleton brothers. The human is constantly being attacked by monsters who just don't know any better, but they never attack back, not even for self-defense. It's so strange. They go through the forest and just... play along to the annoying, pointless games of those two idiotic skeletons.

They don't say that out loud, though. The scientist is watching too, and even though he can't move his face you can tell he's enjoying seeing his... well, not _sons_ strictly speaking, but close enough, interacting with the human.

But the human moves on. They "fight" Papyrus and find a peaceful solution here as well. In Waterfall, they listen to the chatter of that idiot kid, humor the crybaby ghost when they want to hang out, even manage to get away from Undyne without hitting her _once_ and then double back and _befriend_ her! What the hell is that human doing?! They weather Alphys and Mettaton's shenanigans with a smile, every single time, they work their way through the robot's show, even Alphys' revelation that everything was a setup doesn't get them down. They try to _find_ the lizard again instead! The child in the void can't understand.

But then, the human gets through the Capital, and meets Asgore.

And kills him.

And resets, _on purpose_ , once they're on the surface, by throwing themselves off the cliff just outside the cave opening.

And they go back, talk to Undyne, go to the Lab and down to the old, unused tunnels. The human meets the molten abominations, and hears Alphys' secret, and heads back to the Barrier, and this time, everyone gathers there. There's no fight.

At first.

Asriel arrives and takes the souls. _Every_ soul in the Underground. He fights, they can't believe their eyes! Oh, it's the most wonderful thing to see. Asriel, their little brother, with the power of a god incarnate, going all out against the human, not holding back at all.

Until the human calls his name, that is. How do they know his name? But either way, he breaks down. Like the _crybaby_ that he is. It's so disappointing. He's calling the human by _their_ name, even! What the heck?! And he breaks the Barrier, and stays behind while everyone leaves the Underground.

It gets harder to follow the human's life on the Surface. There are fewer save points to look through. But things don't change very fast, ironically, even on the Surface. They're at least glad to see monsterkind finding their own place in the new world. Everything they wanted to do with the Plan, finally coming to fruition despite their failure. Their brother's _weakness_.

They hate him.

They're not sure how long it takes. Months, they think. Possibly years. It's hard to keep track of the passage of time on the Surface form the Void. But eventually, the human resets again. One night the human sneaks out of bed, just like they did so very long ago, takes a knife from the kitchen, and resets, and this time they go all the way back to when they first fell into the Underground!

Their interest is caught again.

The human goes through the Underground again, doing everything the same way, befriending every monster they find and even seeking out some others, apparently to make sure that everyone is as happy as they can possibly be. And none of them have any idea that the human's gone through it all before.

Just like them.

Except for the befriending part, of course.

The human doesn't stop there. They start to count the true resets, as they come to call it when the human goes back to the beginning. They start to count, and eventually they give up. The human just keeps going back to the start, over and over, so they can experience every tiny little variation they can possibly draw out of every interaction with every monster they come across. Just like Asriel did when he found out he could reset as a flower.

And just like Asriel, the human eventually gets tired of being nice. The curiosity gets to them. They reset, and start to kill everyone instead.

And the child in the Void smiles.

They get an idea. Every time the human resets, to kill in a different way, they start feeding their own essence, their own broken, worn soul into theirs. Little by little, they start feeding off the human's Determination at every reset. Little by little, they start hearing their thoughts, feeling their senses, leeching the heat of their body. Until finally, when the human decides to reset one final time to set everything right and live on the Surface with the monsters, they take control.

And kill _everyone_.

Until that skeleton distracts them enough that the human manages to take control of their body again, and gets killed.

They're together inside their dual soul, and the human refuses to reset. They want to, but the human won't let their shoul shatter. They slash at the other, repeatedly, but the human refuses and just weathers the blows.

Just like their brother.

They're filled with such a rage like they've never known before. They jam their knife into the human's chest and hold it there, grabbing them by the neck, forcing them to look into their black, hollow eyes, demanding that they reset, and the human cries but still refuses, even as their projection begins to crack.

But just as they're about to give up, everything freezes with blue. Neither of them can move. The skeleton takes their soul. Blue magic.

Inside the pod, their thoughts stop running. Like a skip in a video.

But the pause lets the human recollect themself, somehow. When they finally wake again, the human fights back and forces the knife out of their chest. A stalemate is formed. They can't reset by themselves, and they can't force the human to agree to it. The two of them just end up floating there, first in silence, then with reluctant talking.

The human asks them why they did what they did. Repeatedly. And they answer, gradually, because they have nothing better to do while waiting for things to happen outside of their shared mindscape.

They hate _everything_. Their brother, for getting them killed and stuck in the Void. The queen, for replacing them. The king, for debasing himself to the same level as humans through murder. Monsterkind as a whole for forgetting them. Reality itself, just from virtue of existing, a privilege neither them nor the Royal Scientist had in the Void. Resentment that became rage that became hatred, until nothing else was left.

They shoot down the human's sympathy. They don't deserve it. They were never good. They just want to erase everything.

They're relieved when the human finally stops trying to cheer them up.

Things are happening outside. They get drained of something, but it doesn't hurt like they'd expected. Then, days later, other news. They two of them are going to be separated. They get to watch the skeleton and the lizard work together on the machine holding them. It just barely holds their interest. They wonder if they'll be able to reset when they're alone again. The human seems worried.

When the machine is activated, their mindscape is filled with blue again, but it doesn't stay in the background. It begins to shift and move like smoke and comes to wrap around them, a hold like iron all across their soul, while the human is unnaffected. Their vision fills with blue that blots everything else out. The not-heat of Determination fades. They feel as though they're being lifted, moved, falling, until the blue dissipates, and they're alone.

They don't even try to reset. They can tell they don't have the Determination for it. It was always the human's.

But then, Flowey arrives and steals them away.

He's going to do something stupid, isn't he?

The child of the Void smiles.

_They can't wait._


	20. Fire and Lightning

A quiet little 'ding' echoes down the hall.

Alphys steps out when the elevator opens to the grey stone of the Capital. She's pushing a wheeled cart along, with a battery at the bottom and the pod holding the red soul perched on top of it, on one of the three slots. Sans is still sleeping, she left him in one of the beds in the old labs. She tidied everything up with the Extractor, and now she's here, to deliver the seventh soul. She looks out over the sea of grey, wondering if this will be one of the last times she'll ever see it.

Asgore isn't in the throne room. She finds him home, drinking tea, seemingly absorbed in his own thoughts until she stammers out a little 'h-hey', and then he blinks and lifts his gaze, first to her, then to the crimson heart next to her.

If his fur weren't already white, Alphys could've sworn he would've gone pale. She glances guiltily at the soul, fidgeting with her buttons. "S-so, um, w-we did it. I-it's fixed. You c-can use it to f-free everyone." She can't even bring herself to look at him. She knows a little bit of how he feels about... the next step.

After a few seconds, he replies. "Thank you, Alphys." His voice seems as strong as ever, but she just nods, still staring intently at one of the potted golden flowers off to the side. "Is Sans alright?"

She hurries to nod again. "Y-yeah, he's f-fine. He had to u-use his magic t-to do it, he's just t-tired. I left him r-resting in the Lab."

"I see," Asgore says. Then, "Could I trouble you to take it down to the others for me, please?"

"Y-yeah, sure."

Alphys grabs the cart and wheels it away without looking at Asgore. Maybe she's imagining it. He sounds the same! But it's like she can feel his dread. He doesn't want to do it, she knows it. But that's not something for her to worry about, right? That's his business. His job as King and all that. All she's here to do is deliver the soul.

She reaches the basement under the throne room in what feels like no time at all. A few key presses on the console of the Stasis Generator, and the shield goes down. She pads back to the cart and presses a few buttons on that instead, to make the top part raise up to the level of the other souls. A quick scramble up to the top of the Generator, and Alphys can transfer the red pod and slot it into its rightful place, dead center between the other souls. She breathes a sigh of the relief with the click that marks the pod locking in place.

Climb back down, lower the cart, reactivate the shield, and start retracing her steps past the coffins. Those still give her chills. It's so creepy, just the thought that there are...  _ corpses _ in them. Monsters don't leave corpses behind, just dust. She pushes the image out of her mind, like so many times before.

On the way past the throne room, she stops. Asgore is there. Surrounded by gold, with one hand on the back of the throne. All she can really see is his cape and pauldrons and horns, he's facing away. Looking at the passage to the Barrier, by the angle of his horns. He glances over his shoulder, sighs, and turns around. "Thank you, Alphys. I will... prepare an official announcement, for later today. Would you like to be a part of it?"

She shakes her head. "N-no, I'm fine. You just... t-take care of everything." She averts her eyes again. He just looks so... weighed down. But she still catches his nod out of the corner of her eye.

"I understand. But, I'm afraid I must insist that you be present when I break the Barrier. You have had too big a role in all this not to witness it for yourself. Both you and Sans."

Alphys is fidgeting with her buttons again. "Y-yeah, sure. We'll b-be there."

"Thank you."

There's a whisper of fabric on petals. He's turned around again.

She takes that as her cue to leaves and hurries to push the cart along ahead of her. God, this is all so messed up. She knows how much he hates it. How much he's dreading what he has to do, what he  _ had _ to do. And she can't even offer any soothing words! She just-

Ugh!

Okay, no, let's just... try to stay positive! Everyone's going to be free! And she helped! Well, she helped Sans, mostly, and apparently that Gaster guy did stuff before her and she just doesn't remember? But still! She helped! Without her, monsterkind wouldn't have a chance at freedom, right?! Alphys should just... take solace in that, and look ahead with hope! That's what this was always about. Everyone's hopes and dreams. Bringing those to life, somehow.

What will the surface be like, she wonders? She's seen glimpses in the things she watches, it's not too hard to get an overall idea, but everything human-related in the Underground is always incredibly outdated. It comes from literal trash, how could it not be? How different will things be when they get out? And...

Will... Asgore have to fight the humans?

She's only now stopping to think about that.

He's killed six of their kind, six  _ children _ . The humans on the surface don't  _ have _ to know about that, but... that doesn't change the fact that it happened. And with the seven souls, he'll become a god incarnate. Power beyond measure. How can something like that even exist without causing conflict? It'll be only natural for the humans to fear him, so even if Asgore doesn't want to do any more harm after the Barrier's broken, he might be forced to in order to protect everyone.

Alphys runs her claws over her forehead.

Everything's so uncertain, even now that they've secured the seven souls. But all they can do is move forward, whether they want to or not.

The door to the Lab slides open with the usual hiss of pressurized air. Alphys walks into the cool air and pushes the cart into a corner, between her desk and the big screen for the security cameras. She sinks heavily into her chair and just... sits there, for a few seconds, staring at the dark screen of her computer. One key press later and the thing whirrs back to life. She types in her password and lets it catch up to the present while she goes off to make herself some noodles.

Seven souls...

It's kind of weird how they got one from each Trait, isn't it? What even are the odds? Alphys could probably calculate a rough estimate, but she just doesn't feel like thinking about anything too hard right now.

Alphys only spares the massive sword hanging on the wall, sparkling with dust, a momentary glance before she settles into her chair again. She doesn't even feel like watching any of her animes. After a moment, she logs into the security system and finds one of the cameras in the old labs. Sans is in the exact same position she left him in, all awkward angles from where she had to literally drag him up onto one of the beds while he slept. But he looks fine. She left a bag of chisps next to him, he can just eat those when he wakes up.

Alphys taps a few more keys, to send the camera feeds to the big screen. She splits it into the usual grid of twelve and sets each part to cycle randomly across the available feeds, then just sinks back and focuses on her food, poking at the little bits of meat and veggies with the chopsticks, sometimes pinching the end of a single noodle and seeing if she can pull it all the way out of the bundle without breaking it. Every now and then she glances back up at the big screen, but she's not really paying attention.

Seven souls...

Did the original seven humans that make the Barrier all have different dominant Traits too? That  _ would _ make sense. And in that case, the fact that they have seven different souls now isn't just weird, it's incredibly lucky!

Or...

...

No, they...  _ do _ sort of have two similar souls, don't they? It's not seven, it's eight, except the first one was never accounted for. It just vanished.

Alphys looks back up at her computer. The feed from Sans' room is still there, exactly the same.

He told her the original human was responsible for the killing, didn't he? Asgore's adopted child. Chara. Why would they do something like this? Kill so many monsters? Didn't they sacrifice themself to try and free everyone with Asriel's help? That's what all the history books say, anyway. But Alphys supposes there's no way of knowing for sure without somehow talking to Chara, and that's just impossible. They're just... a weird black lump now that doesn't even look like a soul.

Alphys should really check on it, now that she's thinking about it.

She sets the empty noodle cup aside and taps at her keyboard again. Sans' image goes away, and in replaced by one of the Extract-

...

Oh no.

"W-wha..."

She types frantically and rewinds the feed, only to find a flower... coming out and... taking Chara's whatever-it-is...

The flower! Flowey! Wh-

Wait.

Her eyes dart to the big screen. She saw somethin- there! One of the tiles of camera feed goes completely black. She hurries to the computer and goes back to the specific camera that was dark, and it's from... Snowdin?

More frantic typing, and this time she makes every camera feed tile together on the big screen, there's so many that each of is hardly bigger than a single pixel. A patchwork of color that she has to step back to examine, to see the white band of Snowding at the top, the blue of Waterfall in the middle, the red of Hotland at the bottom, and so many other colors from the other regions of the Underground.

But the black is still there. It's forming a thin strip at the upper edge of the screen, but even as she watches it swallows another row of tiles. Something breaking cameras all over the Underground like a wave.

Alphys' chest feels to tight to breathe.

She hurries back to the computer, there has to be a way for her to see what's going on! She cycles through camera feeds in a panic, looking for one that might giver her a wider view that isn't filled with trees or snow, until she finds it. A camera perched high up on a steep incline of snow, under an overhang of stone that keeps it sheltered from the weather. It's high enough to see above the tops of the pines have a view of Snowdin Town below, and of a good portion of the forest itself and the wall of purple stone that hides the ruins.

But there's no purple in sight. The far half of the image is taken up by... vines? It has to be. Black vines, darker than any shadow Alphys has ever seen, with massive bright red spines, thrashing, rending the earth like paper, tossing trees and monsters aside like leaves in the wind, she can see the little white puffs of dust all across the wall of black and red.

Alphys' hands are shaking so hard she almost can't get her fingers to hit the right keys when she zooms in on the center of the advancing wall, where there's a break in the mass of black.

There's... a skeleton? No, not really. The bones are made of wood, it looks like. Bone-white wood wrapped in and moved by the black, red-thorned vines. The skull is long, resembling that of a goat's, with long ram-like horns, fangs like knives, eye sockets full of a terrible red light, a mane of golden petals around its neck. The wall of vines seems to the connected to the thing's back, branching out from over its shoulder blades like wings, keeping it aloft as it advances slowly but inexorably forward.

But, next to the pines, the skeleton looks... small? Almost like a child.

No, stop thinking about that! Monsters are  **_dying!_ ** What the fuck?! What's she supposed to do about this?!

Alphys stumbles back and sends her chair crashing to the floor, she's gasping for air, clutching at her chest, she can't breathe, she can't think, oh god, this is Chara all over ag-

Chara! The flower! Flowey must've absorbed that weird soul, and now Chara's back, aren't they?! That has to be it! But knowing this won't solve her problems!!! AAAHHH, WHAT SHOULD SHE DO?!?!?!

Okay, no,  _ breathe _ .

In.

Out.

Sans is useless. He's still sleeping.

In.

Out.

Asgore has the souls, he can use those!

Alphys almost falls flat on her face in the hurry to grab her phone. She has to wipe her hand on her lab coat so she doesn't get sweat all over the screen. There's a tone on the other end of the line. Then another.

"C-c'mon,  _ pick up! _ "

...

...

...

No answer.

God,  _ no,  _ **_no!_ ** He must've left his phone behind while he's writing that stupid speech! No, why  _ now _ of all times?! Alphys claws at her forehead, so hard she can actually feel a scute get yanked loose and the blood start to flow down her temple and turn to dust. It gets in her eye when she moves her head and she sees literal red for a moment before wiping it o-

...red.

Her gaze goes up to the sword above her computer.

Determination! Like Undyne! But Alphys highly doubts she can generate her own, she'll have to rely on the stuff she has in the old labs. One look at the spreading blakc on the big screen tells her she can't waste any time, so she grits her teeth, pushes off the wall, and pads over to the elevator. The door slides open as soon as she steps in front of them, and then the thing is rumbling around her as it descends.

Oh god, okay, she's  _ really _ starting to hyperventilate now. And Undyne didn't make it, even with the power of DT on her side! She needs a backup plan! But how?! Asgore's unavailable and she has no idea if he'd be able to help, even if she leaves a message on his phone he might not get to it before the vines reach the castle. And Sans...

...oh fuck, she's going to have to rely on him, isn't she? Well, he has been a lot more active lately, helping her with the Extractor and everything?! Maybe this won't be so baaaAAAAAHHHH SHIT SHE FORGOT THE SECTION WITHOUT POW-

*CRASH*

...ooowww. Okay, no, she's fine. Just a scare, she's fine.

Alphys scrambles back onto her feet and out into the dim halls of the old lab. There's nothing but the click of her claws on the tiles to accompany her. She goes first to cold storage and shoves DT vials and needles into her pockets, then tracks back to the room with the beds and hurries to Sans' side, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him mercilessly. "Sans! Wake up! I need you, Chara's back, Flowey took their soul, they're killing everyone!!!"

Sans' skull just flops around. He does make an effort to open his sockets, but they're dark, and he just mumbles something unintelligible and doesn't react further, goddammit! No, he  _ has _ to wake up! She puts her hands together and sparks form around her claws.

"WAKE UP!" Alphys shouts, and then she slams her palms on his chest and lets the electric magic loose.

Sans screams himself awake and his socket immediately flares to life, so bright Alphys is forced to cover her eyes, and when she looks again she's staring at the open maw of a massive horned skull that fizzles out into nothing before she can even register what she's seeing.

"alph, fuck, don't d-"

"No!" She cuts him off and grabs him by the shoulders again. "Listen to me! Flowey took Chara's soul and now they're killing everyone, you have to take me to Snowdin and then go to the castle to tell Asgore to absorb the souls if I don't stop them, he's not answering his phone!"

For a moment, it's like Sans is too dazed to process it, but then he... chuckles. And shrugs, and slides off the mattress and onto his feet. "alright. if that's what ya want to do."

With a wave of his hand, the air splits open to the chill breeze of Snowdin and a distant noise like a blender the size of Mount Ebott, but Alphys doesn't stop to appreciate it. She just grabs him by the wrist and yanks him through and looks around frantically, they're... in front of Grillby's?

"figured you could use the help," Sans says, and then he waves his hand again, and the shortcut shifts to the grey stone of the Capital, and he steps through and the crack closes, leaving Alphys alone in the freezing cold in front of the bar.

She can't even stop to ponder his words. She can see the destruction for herself now, the incoming tide of red and black above the tree tops, and the small white figure at the center. With shaking fingers, now also from the cold, she empties her pockets and starts to get ready, filling each needle with red, five of them, probably too much but god she's not going down if she can help it.

But while she's messing with the needles, Alphys sees that the snow under her claws is disturbed. Many pairs of feet have gone past here, and now that she's looking around, the town looks empty. Everyone evacuated again, without her help. And in the trees to her left she can hear distant voices, there are still monster fleeing. That's good, it gives her hope. She clings to that knowledge, even as she holds the needles in her hands, watching the red swirl around inside like mist, the glow of it tinting the front of her lab coat pink. The glass feels... warm? Maybe it's the sn-

"AHHH!"

She can't help the shout when the door to the bar swings open, revealing none other than Grillby himself. "...apologies," he says in his usual low voice, offering her a hand to help her back on her feet.

"Th-thanks," she mutters sheepishly. He helps her gather the needles, but keeps two and examines them closely.

"...determination."

It's not a question, but she nods anyway. "Y-yeah."

"...may I keep these?"

"U-um... I g-guess so? A-are you going to f-fight too?"

The fire monster nods. His flames burn higher, brighter, enveloping her in heat, shielding her from the chill of the snow. His white eyes turn toward where the Ruins once where, to the ever-closer wall of vines. The creature responsible for them is close enough that they can see the shine of its eyes. The forest to the left has gone quiet. There's only the grinding, breaking, crushing noise of the vines advancing toward them.

Grillby readies the needles in front of him. Alphys does the same with her own three, trying to keep her breath steady and utterly failing. Then, she feels a warm hand on her shoulder, a steadying touch, firm but gentle. It lets her take a few deep breaths, even if she can't really calm down.

"...have you ever heard of the Sun King?" Grillby asks quietly, barely audible over the encroaching din of destruction.

"N-no."

His flames burn hotter still, but the hand on her shoulder retains the same welcoming warmth. Almost in unison, both monsters summon their souls in front of their chests.

"...you are about to see him in action."

Alphys doesn't know what to say.

The black-red vines breach the far edge of town, and one after the other, the flame and the lizard plunge the needles into their own souls.


	21. Bergentrückung

Asgore has his head in his hands.

He's at home, in his own room, sitting at his desk with paper and pen. The paper is blank, and the king is just... sitting, and breathing, and wishing he could stop thinking.

He doesn't want to do it. He can see the seven souls, the seven _children_ in his mind's eye, calling him, he sees the blood on their clothes, on his trident, in his hands when he pulls them away from his face, but then he blinks and it's gone. A heavy, shaky sigh drains out of him. Asgore knows for a fact that there will be war when he breaks the Barrier and reveals himself to humanity as a god incarnate. Humans are fearful, suspicious creatures, and to plunge his kind into war again after over a millenium of peac-

No. It's no longer peaceful, is it? The deaths are still recent. The dusty cookbook in his kitchen is a statement to that. Toriel is gone. Many monsters are gone. It'd only be cruel to force his subjects into _war_ after this loss. Perhaps he should... wait? Everyone is wishing for freedom, clamoring for the Surface, and yet...

The king runs a hand over his face.

He can't let anyone else know, can he? He must... keep the souls safe, until the mourning has passed, and he can break the news that there might be strife waiting for them on the Surface. Though, admittedly, considering he'll have virtually infinite power, most of the fighting will fall to him.

His stomach twists so hard Asgore could swear it does a full pirouette. No, don't think about that. That's for the future. Let's just... have a cup of tea, to settle the nerves. Yes, that sounds good. But he makes a mental note to tell Alphys to keep things under wraps for now, and then he pats a hand over a pocket and finds it empty?

"Where...?"

...Well, he'll just have to call her later, after tea. He pads down the hall, past the two closed doors, the stairs, the fireplace. Brewing tea always helps put his mind at ease. And he'll take some of his favorite, the one made from his beloved golden flowers. As soon as the smell fills the kitchen, Asgore feels the tension leaving him, even despite the armor and heavy pauldrons and cape and everything else included in his 'King uniform', as he thinks of it.

But on his way back out to the main room, he finds Sans waiting for him by the dinner table. "Oh. Howdy, Sans. Is there anything I can do for you?"

The skeleton chuckles. "nah, but alph says to tell you to be ready to fight."

"...Why? Is something the matter?"

Sans waves a shortcut open, high enough that Asgore can look through without ducking. "see for yourself."

It's an aerial view of what looks to be the entirety of Snowdin, plus some small chunks of the surrounding regions and a good portion of Waterfall, but...

"Wh..."

The cup of tea shatters at his feet. The king has to take a step back. His hand goes to his mouth.

He sees _destruction_. The upper half of the image is unrecognizable. Pines and rocks torn to pieces, the very earth ground into mulch, and ever from this distance, glimmers of white dotted throughout bearing the unmistakable sheen of monster dust. Between the white of snow and the dark brown of rent soil, a roiling, churning band of red-speckled black. And right in the center of the view, the little colored rectangles of Snowdin Town, with a single dot of shifting light on the road through the buildings.

"Who...? _How?_ "

Sans just shakes his head. "can't say. alph is out there with grilb and they're going to try to stop it, but if they can't she says you gotta do it. that thing's sweeping across the whole underground."

Asgore's hand goes out and blindly grabs a chair so he can sit down. The shortcut ripples and moves lower so he can still see through it. He's speechless. He just watches the distant flame of the fire monster suddenly flare so bright it takes over the entirety of Snowdin Town, and right next to it, bolts of lightning split the air, one after the other. Then, a puff of snow when something yellow shoots upward, flying, wings clearly visible.

"...Alphys?" The king looks at Sans for confirmation.

"they're just really determined to win, 'gore."

It takes a moment for the meaning to sink in, but once it does, Asgore looks back through the shortcut in awe. " _This_ is the true power of Determination? I remember Alphys commenting on it in the past, but she never elaborated on the subject..."

The fight is raging on. Thorny vines are lashing out everywhere only to be reduced to cinders by Grillby's fire, who remains a blinding beacon amidst the frenzied black. And above, Alphys' new winged form is flying around, shooting electricity, swerving, swooping, clawing and biting through yet more vines, trailing sparks everywhere she goes. She's trying to fly out to the rest of the wall of black, which is now closing in around them fast, but she can't seem to find any opening in the whipping thorns. It's a veritable storm of fire, electricity, and torn plant matter.

"yep. powerful stuff. kinda suicidal though, i don't think she expects to win. you better be ready to step in as soon as things go bad."

Asgore can't help his gasp of horror, but he jumps to his feet immediately. His hands fly to the rune clasp and undo it, and both cape and pauldrons clatter to the floor, leaving him only in the dark metal of his combat armor. Monsters use magic, so armor of this kind was only ever useful back during the War. He even ditches his crown, setting it down on the dinner table.

Things are looking grim beyond the shortcut-turned viewport. The whole mass of thorned black is converging upon the two combatants. There are so many vines in the air that even Grillby's star-like light is becoming obscured, and Alphys has landed somewhere in the maelstrom. They're back to back, judging by the direction of their attacks, fire and lightning cutting through the darkness repeatedly, but the gap between each flash, each strike, grows wider with every passing second.

The king turns to the skeleton again. "Sans. If I too fail-"

"yeah, yeah. i'll do my best."

Asgore actually kneels and puts a hand on the other's shoulder. "Promise me you will use the souls. If I fall, only they can save us."

"i'll do what has to be done, 'gore. you just worry about that thing." Sans indicates the shortcut again with his chin, drawing the king's attention back to it.

The black has completely swallowed Snowdin Town and is pulling tighter. One second, two, three- and then a light so blinding it makes him flinch, a light he hasn't seen in centuries. Grillby's full radiance, multiplied a hundred-fold, that scorches across the vines, charged with Alphys' own electrical attack, scouring the earth around them clean in a wide circle and, for one glorious moment, beating back the assault.

Only for the vines to burst out from under them and spear right through their bodies. The pair is rent apart into dust in an instant.

It seems as though time itself stops. Maybe it's Asgore's own imagination, but for a moment, it's like he can see the sticky dust sliding off the crimson thorns in clumps, pooling onto the scorched earth, then being shaken off and lost as the vines spread outward again to start reforming the tidal wave of destruction.

The King feels a sense of calm settle over him. It's not the calm of a fresh summer afternoon, but the calm of the battlefield, of his duty calling to him, his duty to his kind, his people, everyone in the Underground. He summons his trident to his side, its light bathing his armor, tinting it a bloody red.

"Sans."

The skeleton doesn't even need to answer. The shortcut merely expands, flickers to black momentarily, then back to a view of Snowdin, but this time from ground level and head on with the wall of black and red. He feels Sans' hand on the back of his own, allowing him to step through into the snowy chill and see the shortcut then shrink and close behind him. The river that goes into Waterfall is directly to Asgore's right, and he can feel the warm breath of the swamp behind him.

Ahead, is the creature. It begins to advance again, a noise like distant thunder accompanying it like a pack of crows flying overhead. The skeletal being at the center locks eyes with the king, and somehow, the bony, fang-filled maw smiles, the eye sockets filled with red light narrow. The small, goat-ish skeleton lowers itself as it approaches, until it's level with Asgore and just a few paces away.

" **I KNEW I'D MEET YOU SOON.** "

Its voice is loud, booming, and yet... small, and doubled. Like two children speaking over each other. And the skeleton is so very small and... familiar, somehow, in shape.

But the King doesn't let it faze him. He holds his trident out toward the aggressor. "Creature! I will not allow you to harm another soul! I am King Asgore Dreemurr, and y-mmf!"

He's suddenly cut off when vines push through the snow and coil around him from head to foot, even around his muzzle, silencing him. The thorns scrape against his armor with a grating noise like nails on chalkboard. The childlike creature draws closer, still grinning without lips, inches from him. " **I AM WELL AWARE OF WHO YOU ARE,** **_ASGORE_ ** **. AND YOU DO NOT** **_DESERVE_ ** **A FAIR FIGHT.** " The vines pull tighter. The metal groans around him. " **YOU WILL WATCH ME DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU HOLD DEAR, UNTIL YOU ARE THE ONLY MISERABLE, WORTHLESS SOUL LEFT IN THIS EMPTY HELL, AND I AM FREE TO TEAR DOWN EXISTENCE ITSELF BEFORE YOUR VERY EY-.** "

FWOOSH!

Asgore lands back on the ground as the vines crumble into black, oily sludge around him and the burst of fire dissipates into wisps. The creature flinches back, and its grin vanishes as he stands up, raises his weapon high above his head, and slams it into the ground. With a dull roar, a wall of fire erupts behind him, impenetrable. The trident then swings back up and is pointed at the skeletal being again. "YOU WILL FIGHT, CREATURE!" the King shouts. "AND YOU WILL PERISH! I will not allow my subjects to be slaughtered any further!"

The vines are moving and flowing in building anger. The red eyes narrow further. But then, the grin returns. " **I KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE, ASGORE. I KNOW OF THE DEAD CHILDREN YOU KEEP UNDER THE THRONE ROOM IN SOME TWISTED ATTEMPT TO KEEP THEM SAFE, EVEN IN DEATH. I KNOW OF THE SOULS YOU KEEP STOWED AWAY, COLLECTED IN COWARDICE WHILE YOUR PRECIOUS SUBJECTS** **_SUFFER_ ** **.** " The creature moves in close again. " **BUT YOU ALWAYS FORGET ABOUT YOUR FIRST VICTIMS.** "

Asgore's trident wavers for a fraction of a second before he slams it down by his side again. "Speak plainly, beast!"

The creature laughs, an eerie, layered, echoed laugh that makes the King's hair stand on end. " **YOUR** **_OWN_ ** **CHILDREN, ASGORE.** **_YOU_ ** **KILLED THEM. YOU KILLED** **_US._ ** "

The King's collected façade shatters immediately. "Wh...? My own...? _You?_ What are you..." he stutters, but his voice peters out.

 _The flower._ The first golden flower to ever bloom in the throne room, right on the very spot where Asriel's dust was thickest upon the ground. And didn't Alphys explain to him how the amalgamate monsters had come to be? Brought back from the dead through Determination? Asgore gasps. A hand comes to his mouth yet again, and his grip on his weapon loosens. The fire behind him dims.

"Asriel? _Chara?_ " he calls in utter disbelief. "How...? I didn't... I never..."

The skeletal child draws closer still. Its voice is pure venom now, louder than ever. " **WHO FILLED MY HEAD WITH HOPES AND DREAMS?! WHO TOLD ME I WAS THE FUTURE OF THE UNDERGROUND, THE ANGEL WHO WOULD SAVE EVERYONE?! WHO FOISTED THE FATE OF AN ENTIRE RACE UPON THE SHOULDERS OF A MERE CHILD, EXPECTING THEM TO CARRY IT EFFORTLESSLY TO THE DAY OF THEIR DEATH?!** "

"That was encouragement! I never meant for you to-"

" **_LIAR!_ ** " Vines slam on the ground on either side of Asgore, throwing flurries of snow into the air. " **WHY DID YOU ONLY EVER DO IT IN TORIEL'S ABSENCE THEN?! YOU** **_KNEW_ ** **IT WAS WRONG! AND YOU NEVER STOPPED, EVEN WHEN SHE HEARD YOU AND TOLD YOU AS MUCH!** **_YOU_ ** **FILLED OUR HEADS WITH EXPECTATIONS THAT WE COULD NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS HOPE TO LIVE UP TO, AND YOU HAD THE** **_AUDACITY_ ** **TO ACT SURPRISED WHEN ASRIEL WAS TOO** **_WEAK_ ** **FOLLOW OUR PLAN, AND YOU HAD TO WATCH US CRUMBLE INTO DUST!** " Another vine slaps the trident out of Asgore's limp fingers. " **IT WAS** **_YOUR_ ** **FAULT THAT WE EVER EVEN** **_CONSIDERED_ ** **PUTTING OUR OWN LIVES IN DANGER!** **_YOUR_ ** **FAULT THAT YOUR PRECIOUS SUBJECTS HAVE HAD TO SUFFER, WHILE YOU COWER BEHIND STONE WALLS AND HIDE AMONG THE FLOWERS! YOU ARE JUST AS** **_WEAK_ ** **AS YOUR SON!!!** "

The thorns suddenly shoot forward and pierce right through the armor, through the king's chest. Asgore is lifted and cries out wordlessly as he's brought so close to the skeletal child that their noses are almost touching. The creature is grinning again, watching the king's eyes flood with tears, watching his pathetic attempts at putting together excuses, watching the blood and dust pool in his mouth.

" **_BUT,_ ** **YOU WERE RIGHT ON ONE THING, ASGORE.** "

The red begins to spatter down the king's breastplate.

" **I** **_AM_ ** **THE FUTURE OF ALL MONSTERS.** "

The wall of fire flickers and dies. Asgore gurgles, choking, trying to breathe.

" **AND THAT FUTURE... IS** **_DEATH._ ** "

The king hears an ear-splitting noise of metal rending, his mind is taken over by sheer agony, and then...

Nothing.

~~~~~~~~

Chara shakes the crumbling remains off the vines, the pieces of the armor torn asunder where the body underneath was pulled apart. The shining soul hangs there, shaking, and one vine slash is all it takes to make it shatter.

But then, the red flickers in their eye sockets, and they clutch at their skull. Asriel, he's talking, crying, shouting, begging, trying to take back control, do _anything_ , creating a total cacophony in their head, no, _stop,_ **_stop-_ **

" **QUIET!!!** "

The shouting in their skull goes silent.

They straighten themself and look ahead. The wall of vines carries them forward. They can feel each and every monster that is turned to dust against their thorns across the breadth of the Underground. They move slowly, to ensure that no stone goes unpunished, not a single soul is spared. Every region of the Underground is reduced to rubble. They float across the blue stone of Waterfall, but halfway through, they find themself facing a familiar turtle monster.

Gerson isn't holding a battle stance, or wearing his old armor, or even holding his famous golden warhammer. He's just sitting in the middle of the pathway, with a little table in front of him holding a teapot and steaming cup. It's sea tea by the smell.

Chara can't help but laugh. " **HAVE YOU GIVEN UP ALREADY, TURTLE? OR DO YOU KNOW THAT RESISTING IS FUTILE?** "

"Wahahah! You're a smart little freak, aren't you?" He sips from the cup nonchalantly. "It's the second, alright! I figure, if you're here, then everyone else who tried to stop you failed, and a frail geezer like me won't do any better. These old bones don't have that much fight left in them! Wahahah!" He sips from the cup again, then sets it down and makes a beckoning motion with one hand. "So go ahead, do your worst! At least this way I might've bought some folks some time to get away!"

The skeletal child laughs again, even as a few vines snake ahead and coil around the turtle's neck. " **THEN YOU ARE EVEN MORE USELESS THAN I THOUGHT. THERE WILL BE** **_NOWHERE_ ** **SAFE ONCE I AM DONE.** "

Gerson manages another wheezing laugh despite the restricted air flow. "Wahahah! We'll see about that!" he ekes out, before his neck twists, snaps, and he crumbles into a pile of dust so thin it's quickly carried away by the light wind.

Chara just scoffs and moves on.

At the boundary between Waterfall and Hotland, they find the Royal Guard gathered at the foot of Undyne's dramatic perch. The new Captain is at the head of the group, what even was his name? Something with a T, or a B? Whatever. They don't even let him finish gathering enough breath to speak before more vines burst through the rock and tear them all into dust.

" **I AM TIRED OF BEING INTERRUPTED.** "

Getting through Hotland is a little slower. The magma sears their vines and impedes their progress, but they have more than enough matter to compensate. A few other monsters try to stand in their way here and there, brave but foolish, and they don't even stop to acknowledge them.

When they reach the Core, they stop. The wall of vines arches and closes in around it. They creep, snake-like, across the whole massive structure, around each pipe and cable and walkway and power line and anything they can reach, and then the entire thing is wrenched free from the surrounding rock and submerged into the lava until it melts apart. Only then they climb up to the plateau that holds the now crowded Capital.

Feeling and watching the grey buildings crumble apart is easily the most satisfying part so far, even without the added bonus of the shouts and screams of the monsters in them. Every stone, every rock, every brick, is reduced to dusty chunks as they sweep forward, _finally_ closing in on their final objective.

The castle.

The golden hall is crunched into gravel with gusto. They actually move _through_ it just to watch it fall apart around them, and pull themself along through the passage beyond, past the throne room, and down to the basement. The coffins are still here, exactly where they remember them, and at the very end are...

...no.

" **NO!** "

They rush forward, rending the coffins into splinters.

" **WHERE ARE THEY?!** "

The machine is deactivated. The souls are nowhere to be found.

Chara screams in pure rage and wraps the machine in vines, and crushes it into a ball, and throws it away into the remains of the Capital. " _ **WHERE ARE THE SOULS?!?!?!**_ "

They trace back, tearing down the throne room, opening the way to the Barrier, only to see...

Sans? They think?

On the _other_ side of the wall of light.

With all the souls behind him, except one.


	22. A Beautiful Day

Sans closes the shortcut behind Asgore and looks around.

There's the broken teacup, shards of green upon the faded grey wood. The single golden flowers upon the table seems to take up his whole vision when he looks at it. The smell of both it and the tea are thick in the air, or maybe it's just his imagination making it stronger, making him almost gag on it even though skeletons don't have throats. The flower makes him think of the corridor, the golden hall, and everything he's ever glimpses happening in it through the reports of his other selves.

It's a mess. A mess that is equal parts death and joy. Peaceful Frisks, murderous ones, and the entire spectrum in-between. He has the words etched into the inside of his skull for each instance, words he's heard for years from the other Sans-es, who also heard them from others, and so on. He wonders who were the first Sans-es to say the phrases, to pass their judgements, but it's a moot point, really. The very concept of something happening before something else is entirely meaningless when it comes to the branching nature of timelines. Everything happens at once. And just to add to the mess, there are his infinite feedback loops of reports tangling everything even more.

Sans chuckles. Maybe the kid giving this overgrown mess of a metaphorical tree a pruning isn't so bad.

The skeleton shakes his head, and starts walking. His feet take him down the steps and into the passage under the king's home. Only the quiet patter of his slippers follows him here, a whisper of scraping dust trodden underfoot. A part of his nonexistent brain wonders vaguely if it's monster dust or regular dust. Probably both. There's been a surplus of the former lately, enough that it'd go up into the air and end up settling on every surface across the Underground eventually. A hazy memory of something similar happening with volcanic ash surfaces in his mind, a little factoid read once upon a time from some human magazine found in the dump, but he pushes it aside.

The passage opens to a view of the Capital, and here, noise fills the air. There's a voice booming across the space, the voice of the new Captain of the Royal Guard calling for order and calm, but it's useless. The Underground is like an anthill that's been poked with a stick. Panicked activity everywhere. Even from here, he can tell the Capital is full to burst with monsters, so many that some are even starting to perch atop ceiling and spires and the domes of cathedrals from lack of space on the ground, and more are coming in every second.

But the skeleton smiles in amusement, and walks on. He knows nowhere is safe. Not now. Before, it was just one single, small human child. And while that is still sort of true in a rather roundabout way, they can cover a lot more ground this time, in a quite literal way.

He steps into the golden radiance of the fateful hall. The whole thing is pristine clean. Windows repaired, columns of stone replaced, the intricate carving on the opposite wall completely restored. Asgore had a group of woshua and some other monsters revitalize the place. It's like Sans' battle never happened. Shame it's all going to get torn down soon. All that work for nothing. Kind of ironic really, in a twisted way. Sans knows better than anyone how insignificant reality itself is.

Through the short gray corridor, past the gateway to the throne room and the choking scent of the golden flowers, down the steps and into the basement he goes. The skeleton walks past his fellows inside the coffins marked with colored hearts, and stops at the Stasis Generator. His gaze goes up, to the second row of colored hearts, the souls that the ones on the coffins mimic.

Seven souls.

Seven dead children.

But his own heart only has room for one.

Bony fingers find the keyboard that controls the machine. A few key presses deactivate the Barrier-like forcefield protecting the hearts, those precious souls containing the hopes and dreams of monsters, who now are being slaughtered by the thousands.

One of Sans' hands goes above his skull, and his eye flashes. He only cares about one soul, really. The red pod becomes surrounded in blue. The color gather around the soul itself, and pulls it out mist-like through the hatch at the top. The large, pulsating red heart reforms above the skeleton's palm, just like before in the golden hall.

Even without touching it, Sans can feel a ghostly warmth emanating from the soul. A sense of comfort, of belonging. He feels Frisk inside it, somehow. Ever since the kid fell into the Underground, into the misshapen bubble that is the Barrier, he's been able to feel them, now more strongly than ever. Like the tug of a magnet, stronger the closer he gets, yet inexplicable. Here, with Frisk's soul completely bare, so close to touching it, it's like holding the Sun in his hand.

Sans isn't really sure what put the idea in his head. Partly this magnet-like tug, partly morbid curiosity, partly because he can only recall one other instance of himself who dabbled with the human souls so directly. That rainbow monstrosity version of him took all seven souls, though. He only wants the one.

Before anything else though, he opens a small shortcut to check on the annihilation of the Underground. Chara or whoever's in control of that viney abomination is just entering Hotland. He's still got some time left.

The skeleton takes a deep breath, and lets it out in a sigh.

"here goes nothing."

His phalanges close around the shining red heart.

Immediately, the red soaks into his bones and flows straight into his chest up his arm. Pain explodes into his mind, his knees buckle and he falls, both hands clacking hard against the stone floor. His sockets squeeze shut. Its like his whole being is on fire, every bone set aflame from the inside, pressure building in the marrow, until it bursts and the air is filled with cracks and pops as the bones are forced apart. He feels his whole frame expanding, growing, hears something like a tearing noise from his back, added weight settling on his limbs, his torso, his head, everything being deconstructed and rebuilt at once until...

It stops.

Just as abruptly as it began, the transformation ends. Sans is left on his hands and knees, chest heaving, sweat beading on his... skull?

His eyes crack open.

And it dawns on him.

He has _eyes_.

Not empty sockets with a light in them. Actual, fleshy eyes, with eyelids and everything. He sits on his ankles and brings one hand to one of them, then pulls it away to look at it. The fingers, the shape of it, it's like a proper human hand, only with an exoskeleton of bone. The mobile gaps between each piece show the color of the flesh underneath, the same bright, vivid red as Frisk's soul. He pulls his sleeve back, and finds the same result on the forearm, except here he still has a gap between the two halves, what used to be his radius and ulna. His hands grab the hem of his clothes and pull them up, revealing a proper, fleshy torso, with the bottom pair of ribs forming a segmented shell around his chest, and a crimson midriff between that and the sliver of white bone visible just above his pant line, the edge of what used to be his pelvis. He even feels his back, where the vertebrae are exposed but smoother than before.

His attention then lands on his clothes. These are different too. It's not just that they grew with him, but the colors, the shapes changed. His hoodie has large pink stripes now on top of the blue, and no more zipper down the middle, though he at least still has a kangaroo-style pocket on the front. His shorts are more like dark blue capris when he stands, stopping halfway between his knees and ankles. The slippers are gone, replaced by a pair of... crocs? Really? With a light-brown color and still the same fuzzy texture as his old slippers, so they're doubly comfortable. That actually makes him laugh.

"might as well be comfy for the end of the world," he muses to himself.

_*...Sans?_

The skeleton's smile doesn't waver. "hey kid," he says aloud, still inspecting this new body. His voice isn't that much different. A bit stronger, a bit layered. And apparently he has bony wings sticking out of his back now. When he feels around the area where his shoulder blades should be, he finds the fabric all nice and stitched around the base of each wing instead of torn. Convenient. He flexes the wings a few times experimentally, but they're really just for show. No way in hell he can fly with these things.

_*What's happening? Why am I..._

There's confusion that comes drifting into his part of their shared headspace along with the word thoughts. Sans waves a shortcut open, to an aerial view of almost the entire Underground. The churning black line of destruction is nearly to the end of Hotland. He's actually starting to feel the vibrations through the rock under his feet. "we're having a bad time," he says simply as the crack in the air closes.

_*...oh no. Was that...?_

He senses dread and fear from the other soul as he pivots around on one foot and starts walking away from the Generator, leaving the forcefield deactivated. "our red-eyed friend ain't done killing monsters," he explains, croc-covered feet padding back up the stairs and stopping at the mouth of the throne room.

_*No, Chara... I thought... There was blue, and then they were pulled away, I was alone again. Sans, was that you? How are they killing everyone? Aren't they just a soul like me?_

" 'soul' isn't the name i'd give to what i pulled outta yours, kid," the skeleton goes on. His vision is filled with gold. Asgore's garden in the throne room. A sea of golden flowers, the large petals swaying slightly in a breeze borne out of some unseen crack in the stone above. The smell of the flowers here is so strong he can barely breathe. Maybe it's his brand new lungs or something, but he thinks it's even stronger than he remembers.

Sans frees one hand and raises it above his head. His eye flashes, and a **_massive_ ** horned skull appears above and behind him, much bigger than his usual Blasters, much more solid and looking almost alive in the roughness of the bone, the marks of wear at the edges, a missing tooth amidst the many razor-sharp fangs in its jaws. Its skull and mandible part wide and a ball of light gathers in-between with a high-pitched, staticky whine, that then releases as a loud boom as the beam explodes forward and sweeps the garden in an elongated S shape.

"the weed took them," Sans adds. When the Blaster fades away, the flowers are gone, burnt to cinders down to the roots. The throne has been reduced to a heap of molten metal.

_*Asriel? He... absorbed them?_

"seems like it." The flower smell has been replaced with the scent of fresh charcoal, but Sans prefers it like this. He moves on, through the charred remains of the garden, kicking up flakes of ashes with every step, staining his fuzzy crocs with black and gray. Beyond, more gray, and finally, the shifting light of the Barrier.

Right away, Sans notices things are different. Not visually speaking, standing close to the Barrier before used to make him feel... well, he could never put it into words that would express it accurately, but it wasn't pleasant. Just this very faint feeling in the back of his mind, so faded it could just as easily be his imagination playing tricks on him. But now, he's not getting that.

_*...Sans... What are you doing?_

The former skeleton chuckles. "you're in my head, kid. can't you find out?" He lifts a hand and holds it close to the wall of light and smoke. The staticky feeling he'd normally get before isn't there. In his head, he feels as though his thoughts are being scanned, but it's a very light feeling, Frisk isn't probing very hard at all. His arm stretches, and where before he'd meet resistance, he finds instead a vague sense of chill, a ghost-light touch, when his fingers phase through the Barrier.

Sans can't help the briefest moment of giddiness from welling up.

But the floor is _really_ starting to shake now, Chara must be close. He steps through without further delay, then opens a shortcut and pulls the remaining souls through. "heh. loophole. guess i'm the cheater now," he muses aloud.

This time there aren't any words from Frisk, but he still senses their confusion anyway. "it's nothing, kid. just something i heard once or twice," he says in response to the unspoken question.

The souls are let above him, three on either side, and then he just turns around, stuffs his hands in his now single pocket, and waits. And sure enough, not a minute later, Chara shows up, with those black vines and wooden bones and looking even more murderous than they ever did before. Through the Barrier, the red of the thorns is just another shade of gray. They stop out of sheer disbelief, staring at him, at the souls behind him, only to then slam their hands against the inside of the Barrier, and judging by the way their jaw moves they're definitely shouting something, but he can't hear it.

Nothing but a monster and human soul together can get through the Barrier, not even air.

_*That's... Chara and Asriel?_

"yep." Sans is smiling, it just makes Chara look even more infuriated every second. He even waves! They slam their fists into the Barrier again, whip their vines at it, but he knows it's useless. "they sure look killer, don't they?"

_*Why can't they get through the Barrier?_

Sans turns on his heel and starts walking down the cavernous passage. After seeing glimpses of the outside in faded grays his whole life, the colors at the end of the tunnel look brighter than anything he's ever laid eyes on. "they don't have what we have. that weed was soulless."

_*...are we just going to leave them there? With the other souls?_

"yep. don't care about either of those. our friend can just stare at the souls to their heart's content." He steps out into the open, onto the high ledge overlooking the forest. It's afternoon. The shadows are still short. Sans has seen the surface in reports before, of course, but actually being there himself is an entirely different experience. He breathes in deep, feeling the fresh wind, his clothes ripple around him, the sunlight warming his bony exoskeleton. There's a smell of wood and pines and snow in the air.

_*...Sans..._

"i'm not helping them," he says before Frisk can continue. "no point when literally everyone else is dead and they can't do any more harm. just leave them. i never got any reports like this. this is new. that's the least i can do."

Frisk goes silent. Sans walks.

He treads down the mountain trail as the sun slowly goes down. Pines surround him, breaking the sunlight into slanted rays. His crocs crunch over a carpet of needles. Birds are singing, hidden in the branches all around. He passes by the occasional flower along the path. Eventually, he finds a small stream cutting across the trail, which he stops at to dip his hand in and feel the chill of the water before hopping over it and moving on.

"so who started it?" he asks all of a sudden.

_*Huh?_

"the killing. was it you or red eyes?"

The answer is silence. But he feels the shame emanating from Frisk's side of their shared skull.

"heh, don't worry about it, kid. i would've probably done the same if it was me. power like that has a way of going to your head."

More silence. He just keeps walking.

The forest trail fades, and he's left to pick a path through the pines. He passes by a shrub laden with wild berries and grabs a handful, popping one at a time into his mouth, squishing them with his tongue (he has a tongue!), feeling the bittersweet juice burst out. Eventually, he ends up sitting in a small clearing, on a fallen log covered in mushrooms. He kicks off the crocs and lets his toes sink into the layer of needles on the ground. They're nice and cool just below the surface, it's nice.

_*Sans. What did you mean by 'reports'?_

"long story. i can see little snippets of other timelines, basically. other runs that you and other yous did through the underground. it's complicated. i'm not showing you, it's a mess. you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. but i call them reports. best name i could come up with."

_*So..._

"yeah, i had an idea of everything that could happen when i felt you fall. kinda sucks that i'm in one of the bad timelines, but here we are."

_*Um... 'felt' me?_

"yep. i could just feel it. i was always drawn to you in a weird way, no idea why or how." He swivels on the spot and lies down atop the fallen log, one leg propped up, the other dangling by the side of it, foot still grazing the pine needles on the ground.

More silence. The light is fading around him, he can see the blue of the sky darkening through the gap in the trees above him. Stars pop up, twinkling like the crystals of the Underground but infinitely more real. There's a constellation partially visible, which one is that? Sans' head tilts. Gemini, he thinks? He can't see all of it, it's hard to tell for sure.

"can i see it from your point of view?" he asks aloud. "your runs?"

There's no response, but he can almost see Frisk hugging themself in his mind's eye. And after a momentary hesitation, their memories open, and he closes his eyes to rifle through them.

He sees the first time Frisk meets Toriel, and himself, and Papyrus and Undyne and everyone else. It's like fast-forwarding through a movie over and over. The resets grab his attention, when Frisk dies and everything goes black and then they're back by a save point. He's always wondered what it was like from the other end. But he just flips through the metaphorical pages, seeing Frisk search out every tiny little variation possible, and eventually start killing different monsters to see what happens, and he really can't muster any animosity. He has sins on his back too.

But then, Sans flips past one memory, then doubles back out of disbelief. It's a corridor in Waterfall that he knows all too well, but there's a large gray door there. He sees Frisk open it to a bleached, gray space, stalactites and rock formations frozen outside of time, and at the end of the space, a black figure with cracks on its face. They move toward it and reach out a hand, but when they call out the figure starts and fades into nothing.

"you've met gaster?"

_*Um, yeah? That's who he is? It was just one time, I never found that door again. There were two other times I met these gray monsters that mentioned him, I didn't know it was him._

Frisk flips their memory book to two specific pages, both in Hotland, one with a vaguely feline, eyeless monster holding a skull, the other with rib-like markings on their front.

"the team... i never... they're still around?"

_*What?_

Sans sits up, he can't believe it. " _how_ , they got... everything was breaking, i thought they were dead. but how did you...?"

_*...um. How did I what?_

The former skeleton stops, then shakes his head. "ugh, sorry, this is just... another long story. i knew those monsters, i worked with them, and we were doing something that went _really_ wrong and me and paps were the only ones that got out, but i had no idea they were still out there somehow. how did you see them, this doesn't make sense."

There's a pause.

_*...do you... want to help them?_

"do i? ... _could_ i? how would i even..."

_*Maybe I could help. We could... go back. Reset. And then I'll free everyone again, and we can do something for Gaster and the others._

Sans can't help the bark-like laugh that bursts out of him. "yeah, and let red eyes slaughter everyone instead? no thanks. if we go back they'll be controlling you again, won't they?"

_*...I guess so. But now you know how to fix it! You can just help me, and I'll help you, and we'll find a way to get them back. And I won't reset anymore once we're all on the surface._

He scoffs. "doesn't matter if you do. i'm still gonna see the reports. nothing matters, kid. nothing's gonna change in the big picture."

_*We could try to fix that too? Do you know why you get the reports?_

"got a pretty good idea, yeah. no idea how to go about fixing it though."

_*...well, wasn't Gaster a doctor? A royal scientist? Wouldn't he be able to do something about it?_

Sans has to pause at that. He'd never considered it. Gaster knew more about souls than any monster who's ever lived if anyone would know how to get the void damage out of Sans' soul it'd be him. One of his hands goes to his chest, then pulls away wreathed in glowing white mist. The heart forms between his fingers, except of course it's different. It's bigger, still upside down, with the dark spot in the middle, but now it has a right-side up red heart inside the black.

But then his face falls again. The soul dissipates and soaks back into his chest. "even then, it wouldn't matter in the end."

_*Yes, it would! You wouldn't get the reports anymore! You'd have Papyrus ag-_

"no, i wouldn't. it'd be some other sans. that's not how it works, kid. when you reset, you just transfer memories, you don't literally go back."

_*Well, even then! Don't you want to give yourself a chance to get past all this? And give other... um, Sans-es?... good reports to look at? We can all be happy together, and even help the others, Gaster and everyone else you knew._

Sans stays silent. He's given up so long ago that even _thinking_ about doing something proactive again feels alien. But at the same time, a part of him wants to experience a reset for himself, and... there's just _something_ pushing him forward. Which isn't very hard to figure out.

He chuckles. "determination sure is something, huh? fine, i got nothing to lose anyway. but i'm not sure what i'll have to do to get red eyes outta you, kid. it probably won't be very nice, though. think you can take it?"

_*Yes._

"you sure?"

_*I had to watch Chara kill everyone I cared about. Yes, I'm sure._

"alright."

Sans gets to his feet. He takes one last glance up at the sky, but the are no recognizable constellations above him now. "so we gotta die," he says matter-of-factly.

_*...yeah._

"heh. kinda ironic. all those times i thought about it..."

He ducks his head, and opens a shortcut to stick his neck through. He takes another deep breath, taking in the smells of the forest, a sweet scent of some night flower drifting past him, a cool wind rustling the pines. He stuffs his hands in his pocket and rolls his shoulders. "ready?"

No words from Frisk. Just a vague feeling of assent from their soul.

"let's just get this over with then."

His eyes close. For a moment, he looks inward, at this new fleshy body he's only had for a few hours. The beat of a heart, the flow of blood, internal heat. Things he's never had, and likely never will again. He tries to really memorize was it's like for a few seconds, until his eyes open again to the dark of night.

"see ya on the other side, kid," he says.

The shortcut closes.

His head hits the forest floor.

And reality itself unravels from that point outward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, that's a reference to tratserenoyreve's The Thought (https://tratserenoyreve.tumblr.com/mycomics)  
> Also, I feel like I need to apologize for the lack of an actual fight here, but... yeah, I just didn't have anything like that planned. Sorry.  
> We've got one more chapter to go after this, but I'm definitely writing a sequel. Not sure if it'll be immediately after this is done, but it IS going to happen. For now though, just enjoy this chapter while you wait for the final one.


	23. The Man Who Speaks In Hands

Sans is falling. Or is he floating? It's hard to tell.

There was pain, briefly, when his neck was severed, and a few moments of inevitable panic that bloomed in his soul as his form began to fall apart, but now, he feels nothing. Does he even have a body? Doesn't seem like it. He's conscious, but he's not... solid? No, that's not quite the word. He's not...  _ real _ .

His eyes open, but they might as well not have. Everything's black. Velvety, impenetrable darkness all around, except dead ahead (heh).

Frisk is there, floating just like him, but they don't  _ look _ real either. They're all just wispy, misty, faded outlines of red, with their bright, shining soul in their chest like a beacon in the dark vacuum. There's something like a line, a trail of smoke, coming off it toward him, and when his gaze follows it, the smoke shifts to translucent white halfway through, and connects to his own scarred soul in his chest. And he's all wispy and ghostly too. He can even move his hand through the opposite forearm.

"so this is the void, huh?" he muses, looking around at the nothingness.

The human hugs themself. "I guess. I never really had a name for it. I was never here for long." They're looking around as well. "I don't really like it here."

"it's pretty bare-bones, yeah. kinda spooky." Sans smiles. "pretty de- _ void _ of anything."

Frisk snickers. "I don't think it's that bl-ah!" Suddenly they yelp and point behind Sans and the skeleton spins around and finds a face staring at him that makes him flinch back by reflex.

"jesus! some warning would be... nice..." His voice fades.

That face. He doesn't know it, but he knows the scars, above the left socket and below the right, and he knows the blind left eye, and he can't believe his own eyes.

"... _ wing _ ?"

The quiet chuckle that follows seems to be coming from all around them, like the echo of an echo. " **IT HAS BEEN SO LONG SINCE I LAST HEARD THAT NAME.** "  Hands come out from the empty black, long skeletal hands seemingly attached to nothing. " **GREETINGS, SANS. IF ONLY WE COULD'VE MET AGAIN UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES.** "

The skeleton's attention is wholly on Gaster. He can vaguely feel Frisk's confusion through their connection, but right now he just doesn't care. "wing, i... you... it really  _ was _ you in the flower."

The warped skull bobs up and down in a nod. " **OF COURSE. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW PROUD I WAS WHEN YOU PULLED THAT OFF, SANS. HOW** **_RELIEVED_ ** **. TO INTERACT WITH MY OWN FAMILY AGAIN...** " One of the hands gestures in Sans' general direction. " **I CANNOT PUT IT INTO WORDS. I WOULD HUG YOU, SANS, IF IT WERE AT ALL POSSIBLE.** "

That immediately rattles the skeleton back to his usual self. His smile vanishes. "then you're not wing. the gaster i knew-"

" **NEVER HUGGED YOU. I KNOW.** " The bony hands wrap together. " **SANS. THE VOID IS ENDLESS. IT EMCOMPASSES EVERYTHING THAT IS, WAS, AND EVER WILL BE, AND YET IS OUTSIDE OF IT. AND I DARESAY EVEN** **_IT_ ** **IS NOT BIG ENOUGH TO CONTAIN THE REGRET THAT I FEEL.** " He looks down at a body that Sans can't see. " **I AM NOT THE SAME MONSTER THAT FELL INTO THE VOID, SANS. THE DOCTOR GASTER YOU KNEW AND WORKED WITH WAS...** " Gaster smirks. " **HOW WOULD YOU PUT IT?** "

Sans glances to the side, at Frisk's hazy form. "can't say it in front of the kid."

The human pouts, but Gaster chuckles. " **DISTANT AT BEST, NO? I AM WELL AWARE, SANS, AND IT PAINS ME INSIDE, TO HAVE WASTED SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES, SO MANY MOMENTS I COULD'VE HAD WITH YOU AND YOUR BROTHER. I TOLD YOU SO THROUGH THE FLOWER. AND THAT IS WHY I MUST THANK YOU, SANS, FROM THE BOTTOM OF THIS BROKEN, SHATTERED THING I CALL A SOUL, FOR AGREEING TO SEEK OUT A WAY TO GIVE ME A SECOND CHANCE.** "

The skeleton averts his eyes.

" **I DO NOT DESERVE IT, SANS. I KNOW THAT. LEAST OF ALL FOR MY TREATMENT OF YOUR AND YOUR BROTHER. THE MERE FACT THAT YOU AGREED TO IT WHEN FRISK ASKED WAS ALREADY A SURPRISE. WE WERE COLLEAGUES IN THE LAB, AT BEST. YOU HAD NO REASON TO SEEK ME OUT, TO WANT TO FIND ME, AND YET, HERE WE ARE. I KNOW WHY YOU DID IT, SANS. YOU AND I ARE ALIKE. YOU WANTED TO UNDERSTAND, BOTH WHAT HAPPENED TO ME AND YOURSELF.** " Gaster gestures to the black blemish on Sans' soul. " **WHAT DRIVES YOU IS NOT LOVE FOR ME AS A FAMILY MEMBER, BUT CURIOSITY AND A WILL TO TRIUMPH OVES THIS SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLE THAT HAS BEEN WEDGED INTO YOUR PATH. AND I DO NOT BEGRUDGE YOU FOR IT, SANS. I UNDERSTAND. AND I THANK YOU, REGARDLESS OF YOUR MOTIVATIONS.** "

They can't touch, but Gaster still makes the motion of taking one of Sans' hands between his own, even though both of the skeleton's arms stay folded across his chest. " **AND SANS, IF NOTHING ELSE, I CAN PROMISE YOU THIS. MY DEBT TO YOU, TO PAPYRUS, TO ALL OF THOSE I HAVE HURT, IS UNIMAGINABLE, IMPOSSIBLE TO EVER REPAY. BUT I WILL DO EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO MAKE AN ATTEMPT AT IT WHEN AND IF YOU BRING ME BACK TO REALITY. BECAUSE I KNOW YOU ARE ABLE TO, SANS. YOU WERE EASILY THE BRIGHTEST OF OUR TEAM. I KNOW YOU CAN DO THIS.** " Gaster smirks again, and looks pointedly at the tether between the skeleton and the human. " **YOU JUST HAVE TO BE DETERMINED.** "

Sans glances at the link as well, then at Frisk themself. "where's the rest of the team?" he asks after a long pause, still without looking directly at Gaster.

Gaster's expression seems to fall. " **THEY ARE NOT HERE. I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO FELL. THEY WERE...** **_CONSUMED_ ** **. A SUBTLE BUT CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE.** " His gaze goes to the human. " **FRISK HAS SEEN TWO OF THEM. THEY REMAIN TRAPPED IN THE IN-BETWEEN. NEITHER A PART OF REALITY, NOR OF THIS VOID. GLITCHES IN THE SYSTEM, IN A WAY. THEY WERE ERASED LIKE MYSELF, BUT THEY NEVER BECAME THIS.** " He gestures at himself, at the body that blends in perfectly with the black all around.

Sans finally deigns to look at Gaster again, and now he cocks an eyebrow. Or socket edge, as it were. "this what?"

Gaster's hand makes a sweeping motion to all three of them. " **_MEMORIES_ ** **, SANS. THAT IS ALL THAT WE ARE AT THIS MOMENT. NOTHING BUT COLLECTIONS OF MEMORIES, GIVEN FORM AND WILL THROUGH THE POWER OF DETERMINATION. THAT IS WHY THOSE IN THE TIMELINE HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ME. I** **_AM_ ** **THEIR MEMORIES, AND LITTLE ELSE. MEMORIES AND DETERMINATION AND THE VOID ITSELF. THAT IS ALL I AM COMPOSED OF. AN ACCIDENTAL RESET MADE WITHOUT CONSENT OR SAVE POINT TO GO BACK TO, AND WHICH WAS FORCED TO STOP BEFORE IT COULD UNRAVEL THE ENTIRE TIMELINE.** "

" **BUT YOU TWO,** " he indicates Sans, then Frisk, then the connection between them. " **YOU ARE TETHERED TO FRISK'S DETERMINATION, TO** **_THEIR_ ** **SAVE POINT. IF THAT TETHER WERE TO BE BROKEN, YOU WOULD CEASE TO BE ENTIRELY, AND FRISK THEMSELF COULD CHOOSE TO LET THEMSELF DISAPPEAR AS WELL. BUT THEY REFUSE, AND THAT IS WHAT ULTIMATELY ALLOWS THEM TO GO BACK.** "

Sans and Frisk share a look. Both look down at Frisk's radiant heart, then go back to Gaster, who now has his attention on the human.

" **FRISK. YOU WONDERFUL CHILD. WE CAN HARDLY BE SAID TO HAVE MET ONE ANOTHER. YOU MERELY GAVE ME QUITE A FRIGHT ONCE, AND YET YOU WISH TO HELP ME. I CAN ONLY HOPE TO BE AS GENEROUS AS YOU ONE DAY.** "

The human visibly blushes at that, there's a bit of a red glow that comes to their cheeks, but they also hug themself and look away. "I'm... not really. I-"

" **FRISK, NO. I KNOW. BUT EVEN THE BEST OF US MAKE BAD DECISIONS. YOU ARE A CHILD WITH POWERS BEYOND THE COMPREHENSION OF ANY MORTAL.** **_ANYONE_ ** **IN YOUR POSITION WOULD SEEK THE LIMITS OF SUCH ABILITY. BUT THERE WAS NEVER TRUE MALICE BEHIND YOUR ACTIONS, WAS THERE? YOU WERE MERELY CURIOUS.** "

The human hugs themself tighter. "I still hurt everyone. I-I... k-"

" **_FRISK._ ** **LISTEN TO ME. YOU MET GRILLBY, YES?** " The human nods. " **HE IS THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF MAKING UP FOR PAST MISTAKES. HE WAS OUR KING BEFORE ASGORE, AND HE WAS THE MAIN CATALYST FOR THE START OF THE WAR BETWEEN HUMANS AND MONSTERS IN MY TIMELINE. HE DID NOT MAKE THE FIRST MOVE, BUT HE PUT FEAR IN THE HEARTS OF ALL THOSE AROUND HIM, HUMANS INCLUDED. HE HAS POWER BEYOND IMAGINATION. IT WAS ONLY NATURAL THAT THE HUMANS WOULD WANT TO SNUFF IT OUT, FOR THEIR OWN PROTECTION. IT IS BECAUSE OF** **_HIM_ ** **THAT MONSTERKIND HAS BEEN TRAPPED UNDERGROUND FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS.** " Gaster's head ducks lower, in level with Frisk's, and he smiles. " **AND YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW IF I HAD NOT TOLD YOU AS MUCH, WOULD YOU?** "

"No..."

" **EXACTLY. HE EXILED HIMSELF, UNTIL HISTORY HAD NEARLY FORGOTTEN HIS DEEDS, AND ONLY THOSE WHO ONE KNEW HIM PERSONALLY WOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE AN ACCURATE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HAPPENED, MYSELF INCLUDED. AND THEN HE RETURNED, UNDER A NEW IDENTITY, WITH A NEW LIFE AND, EVENTUALLY, A NEW FAMILY.** " He gestures to Frisk's soul. " **SO, FRISK, NO MATTER WHAT YOU, OR I, HAVE DONE IN THE PAST, WE CAN ALWAYS CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. YOU SAID IT YOURSELF THAT YOU WOULD NO LONGER RESET AFTER THIS. WE ARE BOTH WANTING AND WILLING TO BE THE BEST WE CAN BE.** " He offers his hand comfortingly, and Frisk places theirs over his metacarpals, phasing into the bone slightly. " **SO WHAT DO YOU SAY? SHALL WE DO SO TOGETHER?** "

The human's smile is shaky, but present. "Okay..."

Gaster smiles as well. " **I'M GLAD.** "

Sans just frowns, gaze bouncing back and forth between the two. "you really are different, huh?"

Gaster chuckles. " **I HAVE FELT MY SINS CRAWLING ON MY BACK CONSTANTLY DURING THIS IMMENSURABLE ETERNITY I HAVE SPENT HERE IN THE VOID. METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING, AT ANY RATE.** " He glances behind him. " **I DO NOT HAVE MUCH OF A BACK TO SPEAK OF.** "

Frisk snickers again, and Sans can't help a smile, but then he looks around again. "so, what now?"

" **YOU GO BACK, NO? COMPLETE THE RESET, AND... SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS.** "

"yeah..." The skeleton glances toward Frisk, then back at Gaster. "didn't you say something about you two being friends?"

Gaster seems reluctant. " **CHARA WAS MY ONLY COMPANY HERE, UNTIL THEY TOOK CONTROL OF FRISK AND MANAGED TO SLIP BACK INTO REALITY THROUGH THEM. IT PAINED ME TO SEE THEIR ACTIONS, AND I STILL DREAD THE POSSIBILITY OF HAVING TO DEAL WITH THEM DIRECTLY. HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THEIR PRESENCE, I DOUBT I WOULD HAVE REMAINED AS SANE AS I AM NOW. I DO NOT WISH TO HARM THEM, IF I CAN AVOID IT, BUT... I RECOGNIZE THAT THEY ARE A THREAT. IF IT COMES TO IT, I WILL DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.** "

"what do you mean?"

" **YOU WILL SEPARATE FRISK AND CHARA'S SOULS AGAIN, YES? THAT WILL ALLOW FRISK TO SET THINGS RIGHT, BUT YOU MUST NOT ALLOW FLOWEY TO STEAL CHARA'S SOUL A SECOND TIME.** " Gaster brings a hand to roughly where his chest should be. When he pulls it away, a red glow blooms behind his fingers, and out of what appears to be some tar-like substance, several black, red-glowing shards are pulled. They hover together in a vague upside-down heart shape, black as the Void around them, held together by thick strings of pure crimson Determination. " **THEY ARE COMPOSED OF LITTLE MORE THAN VOID AND DETERMINATION AT THIS POINT, LIKE MYSELF.** " The shards sink back into the tar and the red light fades. " **IF YOUR OWN ATTEMPTS TO NEUTRALIZE THEM IN SOME WAY FAIL, I WILL LIKELY BE ABLE TO DO SO ONCE I AM RESTORED TO THE TIMELINE. I MAY EVEN BE ABLE TO REMOVE THE VOID CONTAMINATION FROM YOUR OWN SOUL, SANS.** "

The skeleton brings a hand to his own sternum, thinking. If there was ever anyone who knew their stuff when it came to souls, it was Gaster. He didn't use it for the best purposes back in the day, sure, but he knew his way around the things. "guess so..."

" **IT WAS MY FAULT THAT YOU WERE CORRUPTED IN SUCH A WAY IN THE FIRST PLACE, SANS. IT IS ONLY RIGHT THAT I BE THE ONE TO REPAIR THE DAMAGE. AND IT WOULD ONLY BE A NEARLY INSIGNIFICANT PAYMENT IN THE FACE OF THE DEBT I OWE YOU, BUT IT WILL BE A START.** "

Sans just mumbles something indistinct in return, still looking down at his soul. Then, his gaze goes to the darkness all around. It feels so ominous. Complete and utter silence when none of them are speaking. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel. Just empty black. "how am i even getting you outta here?" He looks back at Gaster. "couldn't i just open a shortcut here after we reset?"

The warped skull shakes sideways. " **NO. THERE IS NO TELLING WHAT MIGHT OCCUR IF YOU CREATE SUCH A LINK BETWEEN REALITY AND ITS OPPOSITE. YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MATTER AND ANTIMATTER COLLIDE. AND EVEN IF THERE WERE NO CATASTROPHIC RESULTS, YOU WOULD STILL NEED TO BE TOUCHING ME FOR ME TO PASS THROUGH, WOULD YOU NOT? AND I SINCERELY DOUBT ANY MONSTER WOULD BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND DIRECT EXPOSURE TO THE VOID, HOWEVER BRIEF, YOU LEAST OF ALL. NO, SANS, YOU CANNOT SHORTCUT YOUR WAY AROUND THIS.** "

"damn. guess it would've been too easy, huh?" Sans glances at Frisk. "we'll figure it out, right kid?"

"Yes!" the human replies. "And then everyone can live together! But..." Their smile fades. "What about... um... the 'team'? Those two gray monsters that I met and... were there others? Can we do something for them?"

Gaster wrings his hands. " **I'M SORRY, FRISK, BUT IT IS VERY UNLIKELY. THEY HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO SAVE. THEY ARE MERE IMPRINTS OF THEIR OWN FADED ESSENCE UPON THE WORLD. I HONESTLY DO NOT KNOW WHAT MAKES THEM LINGER THE WAY THEY ARE. THEY DO NOT APPEAR TO HAVE ANYTHING TYING THEM TO REALITY, OR STOPPING THEM FROM MOVING ON. YOU COULD TRY, IF YOU MUST, BUT I CANNOT SEE ANY WAY YOU WOULD SUCCEED.** "

Frisk hugs themself. "Oh... okay."

Sans can't help a chuckle before bumping his elbow against theirs. "hey, chin up, kid. you're already doing way more than i ever thought was possible. i'm sure they've got their reasons to stick around." Frisk smiles, and he turns back to Gaster. "so, i guess this is goodbye."

The warped skull smiles as well. " **NOT YET.** " Gaster more so flows and moves behind the two, and brings his skeletal hands up to their shoulders. " **I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING.** " His palm move in front of Sans' left eye, in such a way that he can look through the wider gap between the two central metacarpals. And then Gaster's eyelights shine with red, and Sans' jaw drops.

"woah. are those...?"

" **SAVE POINTS. YES.** "

The black isn't empty anymore. It's suddenly full of countless sparks of gold, some far away and nearly imperceptible, others so close they're almost blinding, only a few paces away. Sans can't help his gasp of disbelief. It's just like being among the stars with Napstablook, only infinitely more mind-blowing. These are the timelines. He's  _ seeing _ them. And when Gaster waves the nearest save point closer with his free hand, until the thing is just a massive star of gold right in front of them, Sans can see a faint glimpse of the timeline beyond in the very core of the radiance. It looks like... Waterfall? It's hard to tell, the image is very small and faded and made up entirely of bright shades of yellow. But he's pretty sure it's that one room in Waterfall where everything went wrong with Gaster in his own timeline, way back when.

"wing, is  _ this _ ... what you've been doing this whole time? just... watching through the save points?"

"  **'TIME' IS MEANINGLESS HERE, BUT... ESSENTIALLY, YES. WATCHING YOU AND YOUR BROTHER, AND ANY OTHER TIMELINE I HAPPENED TO COME ACROSS, OUTSIDE OF SPEAKING WITH CHARA.** " He looks ahead, at the infinity of golden sparks. " **IT'S BEAUTIFUL, ISN'T IT? SEEING THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF TIME LAID BEFORE YOU.** "

Sans nods, but then his brow furrows and he looks at Gaster over his shoulder. "wait, 'tree of time'?"

Gaster seems slightly sheepish. " **AH, YES, APOLOGIES. A TERM I CAME UP WITH.** " He starts gesturing with his hands. " **YOU SEE, ACROSS THE MANY TIMELINES I HAVE WATCHED, I CAME UP WITH AN ANALOGY FOR THEIR BRANCHING NATURE. THE TIMELINES FUNCTION LIKE A FRACTAL TREE. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE ITS ORIGIN POINT, BUT LIKE A REAL TREE, IT HAS THICKER AND THINNER BRANCHES. TIMELINES ORIGINATED FROM THE SAME BRANCH SHARE SOME BASIC TRAIT, AND THE INDIVIDUALS BOUGHS CAN INTERSECT AT ANY POINT AND CREATE A HYBRID OF THEIR ORIGINAL BRANCHES. IT'S QUITE FASCINATING, ACTUALLY.** " He indicates Frisk with one hand. " **AND OF COURSE, RESETS CAN GIVE THIS TREE A 'PRUNING', SO TO SPEAK.** "

"huh." That was exactly the word Sans thought of earlier.

Gaster moves around them again, back to their front. " **NOW,** **_THIS_ ** **IS GOODBYE, YES?** "

Sans shakes his head. "right, yeah. kid?"

Frisk nod with a determined look. They clasp hands.

"wing, one last thing."

" **YES?** "

"any idea why i could feel the kid in the underground?"

Gaster just smiles and gestures to the tether between their souls. " **TIME IS MEANINGLESS HERE. THIS CONNECTION BETWEEN YOU AFFECTED YOUR WHOLE BRANCH, FORWARD** **_AND_ ** **BACK. SOME SMALL PART OF THEM MUST LINGER WITHIN YOU, ALONGSIDE THE CONTAMINATION OF THE VOID. I CANNOT SAY WITH CERTAINTY, OF COURSE, BUT THAT IS MY THEORY.** "

Sans chuckles. "sounds about right."

Frisk squeezes his hand. Their soul shines brighter. "Bye, Gaster."

The warped skull shakes from side to side. " **FRISK, PLEASE. CALL ME WING.** "

"Okay. Bye, Wing!"

"see ya, doc."

" **FAREWELL. AND GOOD LUCK.** "

Brighter and brighter the red grows, until suddenly it shrinks to a tiny, concentrated point that flows around Gaster and into the save point behind him. He's alone again.

Gaster swivels around to face the large, golden star. A wave of his hand scrolls through several views of the timeline, until he arrives at the save point closest to Sans' home in Snowdin. Both hands cradle the shining spark, the yellow light fills his vision, the shades shift to their proper colors, and then he's standing next to the shop run by the bunny family. A tall pile of black sludge, with a half-molten skull and hands attached, invisible, inaudible, untouchable, completely outside of the reality around him. He can't feel the cold, the wind, the wood when he lays a hand on the wall behind him. A mere projection of a long-forgotten monster.

The tar shifts, and he begins to slide along the edge of the road, toward the other end of town, passing by and, in some cases,  _ through _ monsters completely oblivious of his not-presence.

Gaster wants to see for himself what Sans is going to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finished!  
> This was definitely an interesting experience. I set out with only a vague idea in mind that ended up getting completely scrapped for something else entirely, so this is probably kinda disjointed, but overall, I liked it.  
> I will be writing a sequel of course, like I said before, but I have no idea when I'll get started. Keep an eye out!  
> And for those who followed this silly little fic of mine, thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the ride.


End file.
